*conservatism*

As both an evolutionary and an institutional economist (two fields he originated), Veblen contended that our habits of thought and our institutions must necessarily “change with changing circumstances.” Unfortunately, they often seem anchored in place instead, bound by the social and psychological inertia of conservatism. But why should that be so?

Veblen had a simple answer. The leisure class is so sheltered from inevitable changes going on in the rest of society that it will adapt its views, if at all, “tardily.” Comfortably clueless (or calculating), the wealthy leisure class drags its heels (or digs them in) to retard economic and social forces that make for change. Hence the name “conservatives.” That (re)tardiness — that time lag imposed by conservative complacency — stalls and stifles the lives of everyone else and the timely economic development of the nation. (Think of our neglected infrastructure, education, housing, health care, public transport — you know the lengthening list today.)

Accepting and adjusting to social or economic change, unfortunately, requires prolonged “mental effort,” from which the leisured conservative mind quite automatically recoils. But so, too, Veblen said, do the minds of the “abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance.” The lower classes were — and this seems a familiar reality in the age of Trump — as conservative as the upper class simply because the poor “cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow,” while “the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands.” It was, of course, a situation from which they, unlike the poor, made a bundle in an age (both Veblen’s and ours) in which money flows only uphill to the 1%.

Veblen gave this analytic screw one more turn. Called a “savage” economist, in his meticulous and deceptively neutral prose, he described in the passage that follows a truly savage and deliberate process:

“It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”​And privation always stands as an obstacle to innovation and change. In this way, the industrial, technological, and social progress of the whole society is retarded or perhaps even thrown into reverse. Such are the self-perpetuating effects of the unequal distribution of wealth. And reader take note: the leisure class brings about these results on purpose.

Current Republican Philosophy in a Nutshell MineralMan​ - demo. underground

1. I've got mine. You should get yours on your own. 2. Don't take any money from us to support others. 3. People who cannot afford health care are a drain on society. 4. People should stay healthy. If they do not, death is an affordable alternative. 5. Don't take any money from us to help the poor. 6. Women are for housework and sex. They should STFU. 7. The Christian religion is good. All others are bad. Convert! 8. If your lot in life is bad, pray that it gets better. Don't come to us. 9. White people are the chosen people of God. We're very sorry you're not white. 10. America First! All other countries suck, and should not take our money. 11. Rich people are rich because God likes them. If you're poor, God obviously doesn't like you.12. If your job has low pay, you should get a better job. 13. If you are old, you should have saved up for your retirement. 14. Every fetus is sacred. Poor children are a drain on society. 15. Trust Republicans to do the best thing for successful people. 16. Science is unnecessary and often contradicts our beliefs. 17. If you are not a Conservative Republican, what are you doing in our country? 18. Only Conservative Republicans are "The American People." 19. What "The American People" want is what we tell them they want. 20. Do not take our money for any reason. It is our money. Get your own. 21. Disagreement with us is Treason. Don't disagree with us. 22. We will decide what's best for you. You needn't worry about it. 23. What we do is none of anyone else's business. 24. Education is an option people should buy. It is not a right. 25. Do not take our money. It is OUR money! Give us yours, too. 26. If we think your sexual habits are icky, stop doing that. We'll make a law against it. ​

Henry David Thoreau: Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

dick gregory: This sums up Republicans Strategy perfectly! They control of their base (Trump Supporters) because they have the brains of an Ice Cube and the rational of a Toothpick! Republicans have taken Fear, Hypocrisy and Lying to a whole new level.

After Trump, Where Will Republicans Go?

​NanceGreggs - demo underground

That was a question asked of me in response to a recent OP, wherein I talked about taking our country back from Trump-humpers.

The answer is simple. Republican voters will go where they always go, i.e. wherever they’re told to go by the PTB in their party.

I’ve written before about how the GOP has spent decades cultivating the easily-led: low-info voters, low-IQ voters – and, most particularly, Evangelicals. The reason for this strategy is obvious on its face. Those who are easily manipulated, completely unhindered by intelligence and pesky facts, will simple-mindedly cast their votes for whoever they’re told to vote for.

The proof of this is most apparent with the Trump-humpers who identify as ‘Christians’. They were convinced by their RW ‘pastors’ that a lying, adulterous, self-declared “pussy grabber” was chosen by God to lead the nation. They were told to ignore his past – a past full of cheating people out of their money, running a fake ‘university’ and a phoney ‘charity’ – along with his sleazy kids and his nude model wife. And they did so.

The PTB in the Republican party effortlessly convinced their easily-led adherents that Trump’s business failures were actually great successes, his never-ending litany of lies were merely exaggerations, or mis-speaks taken out of context, and that his racism, xenophobia, disdain for anyone who opposes him, and his downright cruelty are signs of patriotism and love of country.

So when Trump goes down, where will his followers go? They will go where they are led. They will be told any number of things by their puppet-masters, and they will swallow it whole. Depending on how Trump goes down – and there are several strong possibilities as to how that will happen – the Trump-humpers will be told that ”he was a good man who broke under the stress of the job”, or ”he was led astray by evil-doers”, or ”he wasn’t who we thought he was – we were misled, just as you were – now let’s move on”.

After all is said and done, the GOP will simply downplay the disaster that was Trump, and eventually pretend he never happened. They will come up with a shiny new idiot to get behind, their paid-for ‘Christian pastors’ will lead their flocks to his side, and the Trump-humpers will start humping their newest idol – right on key, predictable as always.

As the case to impeach Trump gets stronger and the evidence against him becomes more indisputable, watch for the PTB in the GOP to start distancing themselves from what they know is a sinking ship. They won’t yell ”Abandon ship!” – but they will start getting into the lifeboats, hoping to save themselves and their party before the Trumptanic goes down. And the easily-led, brain-dead Trump-humpers will be right behind them. ​

North Carolina’s sleazy 9/11 veto override is just the tip of the iceberg: Republicans don’t respect democracy

September 14, 2019​By Sophia Tesfaye, Salon - raw story

A change is coming in 2020. Gerrymandered maps are being struck down by courts across the country, and the 2018 midterm elections point to massive turnout in the next election. Republicans, clearly running scared, are preparing for the course correction by breaking, bending and reshaping the rules in an obvious attempt to make a mockery of the democratic process.

From Oregon to North Carolina, GOP lawmakers have used every dirty trick they can to seize power and undermine the power Democrats even after they win elections. They have taken Grover Norquist’s goal — to turn the tone in state capitals toward bitterness and partisanship — to heart in a major way.

“Our goal is to inflict pain. It is not enough to win. It has to be a painful, devastating defeat. Like when the king would take his opponent’s head and spike it on a pole for everyone to see,” Norquist infamously said in the National Review. Except for the shock election of Donald Trump to the presidency, however, Republicans haven’t had the best record of winning of late. Based on their behavior while losing, it seems that the revised Republican goal goes beyond pain to utter destruction.

Take for instance the extreme and ridiculous proposal by a Texas Republican state lawmaker to abolish the state capital of Austin. Apparently upset that the progressive city approved $150,000 in grants to organizations like Planned Parenthood, GOP state Rep. Briscoe Cain called for direct retaliation against the city of more than 950,000 people, saying the Republican-controlled state legislature should get “supreme authority over mayor and council.”

Briscoe’s nonsensical proposal came on the same day that Republicans in North Carolina lied to their Democratic colleagues to kill a state budget proposal expanding Medicaid coverage to low-income patients. While at least one Democratic lawmaker was distracted by a 9/11 memorial service, House Republicans rushed to override a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, thereby denying increased health insurance access to thousands of people.

Republicans had promised Democrats they would hold no substantive votes during the 9/11 ceremony, with the GOP rules chair confirming to reporter Laura Leslie that there would be no vote. House Speaker Tim Moore admitted he held the vote to override Cooper’s veto — while many Democrats were absent — simply because the opportunity to break the Democrats’ firewall presented itself.

“This is a travesty of the process and you know it,” Democratic state Rep. Deb Butler complained on the House floor, as the GOP Speaker repeatedly tried cutting her mike. She kept switching mikes and turning them back on. “The trickery that is being evidenced this morning is tantamount to a criminal offense.”

It’s a replica of efforts by Republicans in Wisconsin in the aftermath of former Gov. Scott Walker’s 2018 defeat, when they attempted to remove Gov.-elect Tony Evers’ power to approve major actions by the attorney general and hand that authority instead to Republican lawmakers. Republicans in Michigan also suddenly wanted to limit the incoming governor’s power after Democrats swept every statewide office in last year’s midterms.

In Florida, when voters overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to 1.4 million former convicted felons, Republican lawmakers circumvented the will of the people with a bill that effectively blocked most of them all over again.

​And when Republicans didn’t change the rules in response to recent Democratic electoral victories, they ran away and brought the government to a standstill. Republican senators in Oregon fled the state to prevent Democrats from voting on an expansive cap-and-trade bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions earlier this year.

Throughout the country — such as in Tennessee, which has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country — Republicans have tried to block electoral change by imposing egregious restrictions on voter registration drives.

David Frum told us years ago that if conservatives can’t win at the ballot box, they won’t abandon conservatism — they will abandon democracy. Their calls for civility are actually demands for servility. Democrats must understand that, and fight back, before it is too late.

not only will there be voter suppression now candidate suppression!!!

The moves, which critics called undemocratic, are the latest illustration of the president's total takeover of the GOP apparatus.

By ALEX ISENSTADT - politico​09/06/2019 05:00 AM EDT

Four states are poised to cancel their 2020 GOP presidential primaries and caucuses, a move that would cut off oxygen to Donald Trump’s long-shot primary challengers.

Republican parties in South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Kansas are expected to finalize the cancellations in meetings this weekend, according to three GOP officials who are familiar with the plans.

The moves are the latest illustration of Trump’s takeover of the entire Republican Party apparatus. They underscore the extent to which his allies are determined to snuff out any potential nuisance en route to his renomination — or even to deny Republican critics a platform to embarrass him.

Trump advisers are quick to point out that parties of an incumbent president seeking reelection have a long history of canceling primaries and note it will save state parties money. But the president’s primary opponents, who have struggled to gain traction, are crying foul, calling it part of a broader effort to rig the contest in Trump’s favor.

“Trump and his allies and the Republican National Committee are doing whatever they can do to eliminate primaries in certain states and make it very difficult for primary challengers to get on the ballot in a number of states,” said former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who recently launched his primary campaign against the president. “It’s wrong, the RNC should be ashamed of itself, and I think it does show that Trump is afraid of a serious primary challenge because he knows his support is very soft.”

“Primary elections are important, competition within parties is good, and we intend to be on the ballot in every single state no matter what the RNC and Trump allies try to do,” Walsh added. “We also intend to loudly call out this undemocratic bull on a regular basis.”

​Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld said in a statement, “We don’t elect presidents by acclamation in America. Donald Trump is doing his best to make the Republican Party his own personal club. Republicans deserve better.”

The cancellations stem in part from months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Trump campaign. Aides have worked to ensure total control of the party machinery, installing staunch loyalists at state parties while eliminating potential detractors. The aim, Trump officials have long said, is to smooth the path to the president’s renomination and ensure he doesn’t face the kind of internal opposition that hampered former President George H.W. Bush in his failed 1992 reelection campaign.

​Trump aides said they supported the cancellations but stressed that each case was initiated by state party officials.

The shutdowns aren’t without precedent. Some of the states forgoing Republican nomination contests have done so during the reelection bids of previous presidents. Arizona, GOP officials there recalled, did not hold a Democratic presidential primary in 2012, when Barack Obama was seeking a second term, or in 1996, when Bill Clinton was running for reelection. Kansas did not have a Democratic primary in 1996, and Republican officials in the state pointed out that they have long chosen to forgo primaries during a sitting incumbent’s reelection year.

South Carolina GOP Chairman Drew McKissick noted that his state decided not to hold Republican presidential primaries in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was running for reelection, or in 2004, when George W. Bush was seeking a second term. South Carolina, he added, also skipped its 1996 and 2012 Democratic contests.

“As a general rule, when either party has an incumbent president in the White House, there’s no rationale to hold a primary,” McKissick said.

Perhaps the closest comparison to the present day is 1992, when George H.W. Bush was facing a primary challenge from conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. Several states that year effectively ditched their Republican contests, including Iowa, which has long cast the first votes of the presidential nomination battles.

Buchanan said in an interview that the cancellations overall played little role in his eventual defeat, adding that Bush won renomination “fair and square.”

But Buchanan said he was rankled by what he described as a concerted and ultimately successful GOP-led effort to prevent him from appearing on the South Dakota ballot. Buchanan said he felt confident that he could perform strongly in the conservative state, whose contest came just days after a New Hampshire primary that he performed surprisingly well in.

Not being able to compete there crushed him, Buchanan said.

​“If you think you can’t fight city hall, try overthrowing the president of the United States,” Buchanan said.

Officials in several states said in statements provided by the Trump campaign that they were driven by the cost savings. State parties in Nevada and Kansas foot the bill to put on caucuses.

“It would be malpractice on my part to waste money on a caucus to come to the inevitable conclusion that President Trump will be getting all our delegates in Charlotte,” said Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald. “We should be spending those funds to get all our candidates across the finish line instead.”

Kansas GOP Chairman Michael Kuckelman estimated it would cost his party $250,000 to hold the caucus, money he said can be deployed to win races.

Trump aides have long said they aren’t worried about a primary challenge and laughed off his Republican challengers. But the president’s political team has pored over past primary results and is mindful that unexpected things can transpire — such as in 2012, when a federal inmate received 41 percent of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia Democratic primary.

Over 50 House and Senate Republicans urge Supreme Court to rule that discriminating against LGBT people is legal

August 28, 2019​ By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement - Raw STory

Brief falsely suggests LGBTQ people do not exist, but rather are choosing “actions, behaviors, or inclinations.”

53 members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are urging the nation’s highest court to rule against LGBTQ people when it hears three landmark cases October 8. The lawmakers, all Republicans (list below), say the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not – and should not be interpreted to – protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, including their own constituents.

In a grotesque and ignorant reading of a key portion of the 55-year old legislation the Republican lawmakers suggest LGBTQ people do not exist, but rather are choosing “actions, behaviors, or inclinations,” which is false.

“Title VII’s sex discrimination provision prohibits discrimination because of an individual’s sex; it does not prohibit discrimination because of an individual’s actions, behaviors, or inclinations,” the lawmakers say in the amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court.

The Advocate notes the brief “demeans the plaintiffs bringing actions forward to the court,” including claiming one of the plaintiffs only claimed he was gay so he could sue for wrongful termination. It also repeatedly misgenders a funeral director who is a woman and transgender, referring to her as “he.”

The brief also wrongly claims a correct interpretation of the Civil Rights Act to include LGBTQ people would “adversely” affect “the protection of women’s rights.”

And in a nod to the Hobby Lobby case, the brief proclaims that the “funeral home is a closely held corporation whose principal is a Christian,” strongly suggesting it is his First Amendment right to fire someone because they are LGBT.

The friend of the court brief was co-authored by Ken Starr, the former head of Baylor University who resigned in disgrace. Starr is also known for having defended Jeffrey Epstein, for being an attorney representing supporters of California’s anti-gay Prop 8, and the infamous special prosecutor whose work led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

​It is unknown if taxpayer funds were used to pay for the brief.

Republican Senators who have signed the amicus brief include Marsha Blackburn, Roy Blunt, Mike Braun, John Cornyn, Kevin Cramer, James Inhofe, James Lankford, and Mike Lee.

Don’t be fooled by the GOP backlash against Steve King — Republican racism is alive and well

August 27, 2019 ​By Alex Henderson, AlterNet - Commentary

​Rep. Steve King’s racism and sexism are so extreme that these days, even hard-right Republicans like Liz Cheney (daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are calling him out. The Iowa congressman has said that the term “white nationalist” should not be considered offensive, and he recently cited rape and incest as two ways to prevent low birth rates. But journalist Zak Cheney-Rice, in an article published in New York Magazine this week, argues that GOP attacks on King are merely a smokescreen — and that no matter how many Republicans decide to throw King under the bus, racism and bigotry are alive and well in the GOP.

Although King was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002 and has been reelected many times since then, Cheney-Rice notes that he will be fighting a tough battle for reelection in 2020. King, Cheney-Rice points out, has received a “daunting” GOP primary challenge from fellow Republican Randy Feenstra — and if he wins the primary, King will face Democrat J.D. Scholten in the general election (in 2018, King defeated Scholten by only 3%). Moreover, Cheney-Rice writes, GOP donors are abandoning King. But Americans, Cheney-Rice stresses, shouldn’t be fooled by King-has-to-go rhetoric coming from Republicans, as there are many others in the GOP who are quite happy to promote racism.

Cheney-Rice cites Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama as an example, noting that in 2014, the congressman accused Democrats of promoting a “war on whites” and described that “war” as “part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008.” More recently, Cheney-Rice adds, Brooks has pointed to Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar as examples of “the growing influence of the Islamic religion in the Democratic Party ranks.”

“Today’s GOP is marked by sycophants for a president who sought to ban Muslim immigration, who praises white supremacists, and who derides black countries and cities as shitholes and sites of infestation,” Cheney-Rice explains. “It features representatives like Matt Gaetz, who promoted the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros was funding a migrant caravan full of criminals — a theory that later formed the basis for Robert Bowers’ massacre of 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue.”

Anti-Latino bigotry, Cheney-Rice points out, is another prominent feature of the GOP in 2019.

In the past, members of the Bush family made a concerted effort to court Latino voters. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican, is a fluent Spanish speaker who has been interviewed in Spanish more than once on the Univision network; his older brother, former President George W. Bush, viewed Latinos as a crucial part of the GOP’s future when he was governor of Texas in the 1990s.

But when Barack Obama was president, Cheney-Rice recalls, many Republicans turned against people with Hispanic names — and “Latinos quickly went from being a coveted voting demographic to being symbolic of all the ways America had gone downhill under Obama.”

Cheney-Rice concludes his New York Magazine piece by emphasizing that King is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to racism in the Republican Party of 2019.

“Even as the Iowa congressman inches closer to defeat,” Cheney-Rice warns, “there’s little evidence to suggest that a post-King GOP will look much different than it does today.”

After Trump broke his promise to eliminate the national debt, GOP senators say ‘next term’

​Under President Donald Trump, both the national debt and the annual budget deficit have reached all time highs, despite his 2016 campaign promises to eliminate both. Rather than concede another broken promise, his Republican defenders in the Senate are now claiming that he will solve both — next term.

Candidate Donald Trump made a lot of unrealistic promises. His oft repeated and now abandoned mantra that Mexico would entirely fund a massive border wall across the nation’s entire southern border is the best known, but he also made numerous lofty promises to magically eliminate the $19 trillion national debt and to get rid of the budget deficit almost immediately.

From his 2015 campaign kickoff speech, Trump promised that he would make the debt disappear. “I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers,” he told the Washington Post in 2016. “I would say over a period of eight years.” Trump said he could do this without even raising taxes because of the spectacular trade deals that he uniquely would be able to negotiate if elected.

The national debt is now more than $22.5 trillion, several trillion higher than when Trump took office. Trump has claimed to have the “greatest economy in the history of our country,” but thanks to a massive tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, the annual budget deficit is about to exceed $1 trillion for the first time ever (even without purchasing Greenland) years before analysts expected.

​Trump recently signed a budget deal — agreed to by the GOP-controlled Senate — that further increased spending, despite his campaign promise to freeze the budget and despite promising last year that he would “never sign another bill” with big spending increases again. Should the widely-predicted economic downturn happen, that would mean even less revenue, which would make spending cuts even more difficult.

According to a Washington Post report on Friday, Trump and his allies have arrived at a solution to the problem: pretending that it will all be fixed in Trump’s second term.

The article notes that Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD) recently suggested to the New York Times that Trump’s deficit reduction efforts might come as soon as 2021. “I hope in a second term, he is interested,” he suggested. “With his leadership, I think we could start dealing with that crisis. And it is a crisis.”

Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso (R-WY) told the Times: “We’ve brought it up with President Trump, who has talked about it being a second-term project.” And Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) added that “it probably takes a second-term president” to prioritize debt reduction.

Back in July, the Post noted, leaks from the White House gave the impression that in a second Trump term, spending cuts and deficit reduction would be coming.

Trump’s track record with debt, however, would suggest that this promise, too, is unlikely to be kept.

GOP leadership tells House Republicans to lie about white supremacist gun massacres – call it ‘violence from the Left’

August 17, 2019 ​By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement - Raw Story

​House Republican leadership has sent a memo to GOP members of Congress directing them to lie about right wing white supremacist gun massacres, and to call it “violence from the left.”

The memo, which The Tampa Bay Times acquired, includes talking points for congressional Republicans to parrot when speaking with reporters or constituents. It instructs them on how to address questions about gun violence, including the domestic terrorism recently perpetrated in El Paso, Texas.

If asked a question like, “Do you believe white nationalism is driving more mass shootings recently?” GOP lawmakers are being told to offer this response:

“White nationalism and racism are pure evil and cannot be tolerated in any form,” the document directs lawmakers to say, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “We also can’t excuse violence from the left such as the El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.”

The false claims are not only being sent to Republicans in the House, the lawmakers are sending them to their constituents.

For example, as the Tampa Bay Times notes, U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida sent the false “violence from the left” claim in a newsletter to his constituents.

​The House Republican leadership talking points also direct lawmakers to falsely conflate mass shootings where there was no political motivation, or an ambiguous motivation, with the left, such as the Dayton shooter.

“The GOP conference talking points ascribed other shootings as leftist violence despite ambiguous, if not contradictory, evidence,” the Tampa Bay Times explains. “The shooter that wounded U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, a Democrat, was paranoid about government and obsessed with the Arizona Congresswoman, a law enforcement investigation found. His political persuasions were mixed and did not appear to be a factor. Nor does it seem that the May shooters at a Colorado high school — both teenagers and bullied students — were motivated by politics.”

Pro-LGBTQ Republican group endorses the most anti-LGBTQ president since Reagan

Once upon a time, the Log Cabin Republicans were nominally a pro-LGBTQ organization.

“There are still too many Republican candidates who try to capitalize on gay issues by using anti-gay politics,” decried the group’s former executive director Patrick Sammon back in 2008. “I think it’s less effective. We’ll see less of it in the future.”

On Friday, the same group offered its unqualified endorsement of President Donald Trump, a racist, sexist, white supremacist who has spent his first three years in office undermining every protection and right that the LGBTQ community has spent decades fighting for.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Robert Kabel and Jill Homan, the group’s chairman and vice chairwoman, bend over backwards trying to find a positive spin on the blatantly anti-LGBTQ agenda put forth by this administration, a mental contortion so difficult they were compelled to name drop Apple CEO Tim Cook before they managed to invoke the man they are endorsing.

The crux of their argument appears to be that the Republican Party’s animosity towards the LGBTQ community is more subtle today than it was in the 1990s, and therefore Trump is deserving of praise.

“For LGBTQ Republicans, watching the 2016 GOP convention before Donald Trump took the stage was like a dream fulfilled,” Kabel and Homan write.

“The distance between that event and Pat Buchanan’s hate-filled exhortation against the LGBTQ community in Houston in 1992 is a powerful measurement of how far we’ve come.”

That is the tragicomical bar with which the Log Cabins are measuring Trump’s ally-ship: Pat Buchanan publicly decrying the “radical feminism” of President Bill Clinton’s agenda of “homosexual rights” onstage at the Republican National Convention. And it’s a bar that, as Kabel and Homan acknowledge, the modern GOP clears only barely.

“Some of the moral leaders who stood with Buchanan back then were still there three years ago in Cleveland, to be sure. But this time, they refrained from passing judgment on gays and lesbians,” the endorsement reads. Yes, the only difference between Pat Buchanan’s Republican Party and Donald Trump’s is that the homophobia is now latent. Progress!

Kabel and Homan make a few ham-fisted attempts to point to “accomplishments” by the current administration, and predictably come up short.

They point to Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year in which he promised to end the spread of HIV in 10 years, without offering much in the way of details about how he planned to achieve this.

In fact, in the months since that promise, the Trump administration has done nothing but obstruct access to health care, particularly among those who are most vulnerable to HIV diagnoses.

Trump tried to take credit for a sizable donation of HIV prevention drug Truvada by pharmaceutical giant Gilead, neglecting to mention the donation was widely seen by activists as little more than a public relations ploy by the company in an attempt to head off a potential legal fight over the drug’s expiring patent.

​Indeed, Trump’s supposed interest in ending the HIV epidemic flies in the face of his actual record on the issue, including his decision to fire the entire membership of the White House’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS in 2017.

The two also hailed the Trump administration’s recently unveiled initiative to fight the criminalization of homosexuality abroad, specifically targeting a list of some 70 countries which have laws expressly prohibiting homosexuality. They point to the selection of Richard Grennell, the highest ranking openly gay member of the administration who was appointed to head up the initiative, to underscore the seriousness with which the administration is addressing the problem.

What a happy coincidence, then, that chief on the list of countries targeted by this initiative is Iran, a country that Trump has spent his entire term attacking. The initiative was announced weeks after Iran publicly hanged a man for being gay, and was seen by many foreign policy experts as a way to gin up international pressure on the country under the guise of concern for human rights abuses.

For a real exploration of the seriousness with which the administration concerns itself with anti-LGBTQ violence abroad, consider the case of Brunei, a country with which Trump has had numerous previous business dealings. Rulers there imposed new draconian anti-LGBTQ laws earlier this year — after the White House’s initiative was launched — that included the death penalty for anyone engaging in “homosexual acts.” The international community erupted in outrage. The Trump White House was silent on the matter.

Also on the list of anti-LGBTQ countries: Saudi Arabia. In April, five men were accused of homosexuality and subsequently beheaded as part of a larger mass execution of nearly 40 people for various charges. One of them reportedly had his dismembered body and head pinned to a pole in a public square.

Trump counts the Saudi royal family among his closest business partners and allies, and has repeatedly sided with them over the United States’ intelligence agencies. His financial ties to the country and its monarchy stretch back decades and into the tens of millions of dollars.

Just how invested is Trump in his administration’s effort to combat international oppression of the LGBTQ community? ...

​Kabel and Homan’s last piece of evidence is somehow their most disingenuous. They spend a paragraph extolling the “accomplishments” of this administration, arguing that they benefitted the entire country. And since there are LGBTQ people in the country — ipso facto, presto chango — he must be pro-LGBTQ.

Among the accomplishments they cite: “The president’s tax cuts,” which exploded the deficit and only benefitted the wealthiest Americans at the expense of low and middle class workers; “aggressive negotiations on trade deals,” which have resulted in an economically disastrous trade war with China that had farmers in states like Minnesota booing Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue this week; and “his hard line on foreign policy,” including, among other things, his inhumane policy of forcibly separating children from their parents at the southwest border and demonizing asylum seekers who are fleeing, among other things, anti-LGBTQ persecution in their home countries.

Ignored are Trump’s targeted harassment of the transgender community. Or his refusal to accommodate the same-sex partners of foreign diplomats stationed in the United States. Or a decision announced just this week by the Department of Labor to make it easier for private businesses to fire employees for being gay.

To any discerning human, whatever “support” the current occupant of the White House displays for the LGBTQ community is not owed to a concerted effort to protect a vulnerable, persecuted community, but to a happy accident that affords the administration good optics.

Or, to have the Log Cabin Republicans of 2008 put it another way, “The fact is that there are still people … who lack integrity who are willing to try and use gay people as a political issue.”

I KNOW this sounds crazy, but

NanceGreggs - Demo Underground​8/14/19

​… please hear me out. I first had this thought last fall, and I think I might be onto something.

I believe that the powers-that-be in the Republican party want Trump gone.

When they first elected him, I’m sure they saw him as a political rube, someone who could be easily manipulated into doing their bidding due to his lack of political experience, along with an obvious lack of any real enthusiasm for the job.

No doubt he was seen as what he was – a bloviating con artist who could sell the GOP agenda to their low-info, low-IQ ‘base’, while doing what he was told by party higher-ups. He was going to be their ‘president-in-name-only’, a lazy-assed grifter who’d be satisfied with acting the part between golf games.

They’d paved the way for him – getting Evangelical leaders on board who gladly convinced their sheep that a thrice-married adulterer was a good Christian man, tidying up his past as a liar and a cheat by passing him off as a self-made billionaire, convincing Republican voters that the prosperity he had personally achieved would translate into untold success and riches for them as well.

Trump’s nude model wife, Melania, was sold as a model First Lady. Ivanka, Jared, Don Junior and Eric were touted as trusted advisors, despite knowing absolutely nothing about domestic or foreign policy. And the base lapped it up.

It was all so easy-as-pie perfect, a movie script written by a GOP that saw the destruction of the environment, the dismantling of our democracy, and the distancing of our nation’s allies as a means to their ends.

What could possibly go wrong – other than everything?

Once ensconced in the Oval Office, the man the Republican party had dismissed as their puppet turned out to be Putin’s puppet instead – the problem being that he was blatantly obvious about it. The Republican higher-ups that had imagined a pOTUS who’d restrict his word-salad meanderings to anecdotal tales about his alleged prowess on the links were now saddled with a ‘stable genius’ prone to hissy-fits, thousands of ludicrous lies, and public meltdowns. The candidate they’d championed as a man-of-the-people exposed himself as being a man out for himself – the people and the party that supported him be damned.

The PTB in the GOP know that Trump is unelectable to a second term. They know that he has done incredible damage to their ‘brand’. They know that his disapproval numbers are a death knell – and they know that bell tolls for them.

The Mueller report, children in cages, racist rhetoric that led to the deaths of innocents, “very fine people on both sides”, the endless litany of easily-debunked lies, the refusal to believe our own intelligence agents over Putin’s ‘word for it’, paid-off porn stars, meetings with Russian agents about ‘adoptions’, Middle East peace plans concocted by a know-nothing, debt-ridden son-in-law, the ‘very best people’ ending up in prison, Republicans perjuring themselves, the exploded deficit, tariffs that are bankrupting farmers, hate crimes and mass shootings on the rise, a shaky stock market, the distrust of our allies – and the blatant stupidity of a “pResident” who thinks wind turbines cause cancer, and claims the Revolutionary War was won because the colonists shut down the airports in 1775.

As devoted as the Republicans have been in their attempts to defend the indefensible, there comes a time when you realize that your “pResident” has effectively destroyed your party’s chances of winning the votes of Hispanic “rapists”, Muslim “terrorists”, people from “shithole countries”, parents appalled by children in cages, Christians who actually embrace the teachings of Christ, women who want the right to choose, decent people who want assault weapons off our streets, people with morals who don’t want a self-proclaimed pussy-grabber in the White House, and those who don’t want people designated as security risks operating without security clearances that give them valid access to our country’s classified information.

The Trump supporters that are left are just that – Trump supporters rather than GOP supporters. There aren’t enough of them to secure his re-election, and the Republicans know that.

I believe the GOP have abandoned all hope of seeing their fair-haired boy elected to a second term. But at this point, they have no choice but to play along to get along. Offering primary challengers to The Dotard would be an admission that the idiot they’d foisted on their own party was a monumental mistake – and they’re not about to own up to that particular catastrophe. They have no alternative than to dance with the idiot who brought them to the electoral prom, knowing that he’s the guy most likely to shit in the punchbowl before the band finishes their final set.

Trumpism is over, it’s done, and the only people keeping it on life-support are those who simply have no alternative but to pretend that imminent disaster is just part of the same hoax being promoted by such ne’er-do-wells as scientists, economists, political analysts, historians – and the well-educated, well-informed intellectual nut-jobs who give credence to their dire warnings.

The Republican PTB are tired of coming up with creative explanations for their “pResident’s” insanity – and it shows.

The forever-faithful pundits still turn up on the news shows – but looking like they’re facing a firing squad instead of those cameras they were once convinced they could seduce into submission.

Even the Evangelicals are having second thoughts about Trump being the Second Coming – and everyone knows that those ongoing investigations into the Trump Crime Family aren’t going to end in "total vindication, total exoneration!" no matter how many times Twitler tweets exactly that.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do everything possible to get the vote out. We still have a fight on our hands, and all able-minded soldiers are expected to do their part.

But I do believe that our enemies in the GOP have taken as much from Trump as they can swallow. They are watching their party being decimated, their ‘brand’ being trampled into the mud, and their once-touted ‘principles’ being exposed as non-existent.

The party that now spends its every waking hour trying to spin that ridiculous pile of straw that is Trump into gold are hearing the name Rumpelstiltskin louder and louder with every passing day – and they’re as tired of defending this bullshit as we are of hearing it.

They want him gone, maybe as much as we do – or even more so, because it’s not our party that’s being destroyed every time he opens his mouth, it’s theirs.

This is the face of radical Republican anti-Semitism

Call the Capitol hypocrisy police: We seem to have another incident needing attention.

This involves the pot calling the kettle anti-Semitic.

For weeks, Republicans, led by Donald Trump and his rally chants, have called for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to “go back where she came from” as a naturalized immigrant born in Somalia, in part for anti-Israel policy issues that they see as “anti-Semitic.” They and some Democrats objected to her saying that the pro-Israel lobby was too dominant in lobbying Congress through political donations.

Trump and Republican leaders have strained to make “the vile” Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) the face of Democrats, and dumped on Democrats who don’t drum her out of Congress. Omar is an outspoken, very liberal, Muslim woman.

The criticisms are wrong, but predictable. Now comes the good part.

​The Times of Israel newspaper published the heart of campaign letters from Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), head of the Republican National Congressional Committee, that identify three “left-wing radicals” that he says “bought control of Congress for the Democrats.” Emmer writes that George Soros and Michael Bloomberg are Jewish, wealthy and politically involved, just not for Republicans; Tom Steyer, the impeachment guy, was born to a Jewish family but identifies as Episcopalian.​The Minneapolis-based American Jewish World newspaper first saw the letter, on Emmer’s letterhead, which appears to have been circulated in March and July. It says, “the news of impactful, real progress on turning our nation around was undercut by biased media and hundreds of millions of dollars of anti-Republican propaganda put out by liberal special interests, funded by deep-pocketed far-left billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. . . These left-wing radicals essentially BOUGHT control of Congress for the Democrats.”

Difference Between Criticizing Israel and Attacking JewsIn case you have been dead for the last several centuries, this idea that rich Jews use their money for power and control is a standards anti-Semitic trope. On the other hand, there is a distinct difference between debating Israeli policies about occupying the West Bank and supporting more Jewish settlements in the face of United Nations resolutions than in attacking Jews for being, well, Jews.

So, the lesson here seems to be that if the message is from first-year Omar, she should be tossed from Congressional committees, from Congress and the country for not loving America. If essentially the same message is distributed from Emmer on behalf of electing Republicans to Congress, I guess nothing is supposed to happen except sending checks to help out.

Omar apologized for offending anyone who reacted poorly to her tweet that the pro-Israel lobby buys its influence on Capitol Hill. We haven’t heard anything like that from Emmer or Republican leadership. In fact, the NRCC under Emmer has repeatedly accused Democrats of anti-Semitism, especially Omar, the newspaper reported.

Steve Hunegs, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, criticized Emmer’s letter but told the newspaper that he is “a good friend to the Jewish community in Minnesota.”

Emmer represents Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, and was named the head of the NRCC after the mid-term elections. While Emmer is himself facing accusations of anti-Semitism, MinnPost notes that under his watch, the NRCC has regularly accused Democrats of the same thing. It has made Omar a regular target for accusations of anti-Semitism and has accused some of her fellow House Democrats of anti-Semitism for not outright condemning Omar.

Ruthless Name CallingEmmer has made it clear in interviews that Repubican Party leadership endorses the name-calling effort. In June, Emmer told Politico his staff has a “direct mandate” from himself and Republican leadership to “to be ruthless,” calling House Democrats “deranged” and “socialists.”

David Goldenberg, the Midwest Regional Director for the Anti-Defamation League, told MinnPost that using anti-Semitism for political gain or saying that it is limited to one political party makes it harder to confront.

After several Democratic congress members who are Jewish complained to the NRCC, Chris Pack, the NRCC communications director did not explicitly address how the NRCC defines anti-Semitism as or if he thinks Jewish members can be anti-Semitic. He said, “With anti-Semitism on the rise, it’s important for all sides to be sensitive with regards to this serious issue. It is also important for all sides to hold those accountable who turn a blind eye to the anti-Semites within the House Democratic conference.”

Emmer has been a congressman since 2015, replacing Michele Bachmann. He ran for governor in 2010. He worked for his family’s lumber business, is married with seven children, and is an avid hockey player and coach.

"The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy," said State Sen. John McCollister. Now the GOP wants him out

​IGOR DERYSH - SalonAUGUST 6, 2019 9:54PM (UTC)

The Nebraska Republican Party called for Republican state Sen. John McCollister to register as a Democrat after he wrote that the GOP is “enabling white supremacy.”

Ryan Hamilton, the head of the state Republican Party, called for McCollister to “tell the truth about his partisan views and re-register as a Democrat” on Monday after he called out the partyfor being “complicit” to “obvious racist and immoral activity inside our party.” ​

​"John McCollister has been telegraphing for years that he has little if nothing in common with the Republican voters in his district by consistently advocating for higher taxes, restrictions on American’s Second Amendment rights, and pro-abortion lobby,” Hamilton said in a statement. “His latest false statement about Republicans should come as no surprise to anyone who is paying attention, and we’re happy he has finally shed all pretense of being a conservative.”

“I am happy to send a change of voter registration form along to his office so he can make the switch officially and start, for once, telling the truth to voters in his district.”

​Hamilton’s statement came just months after he vowed to crack down on racism in the party after an aide to Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts was caught posting wildly racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic comments on a far-right YouTube page run by a far-right activist labeled a white nationalist.

McCollister called out his own party after a shooter who published an anti-immigrant screed on the far-right hate repository 8chan killed 22 people and injured dozens of others at an El Paso Walmart in an attack he said was in response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” echoing the frequent rhetoric of President Trump and Fox News.

"The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy in our country," McCollister tweeted on Sunday. "As a lifelong Republican, it pains me to say this, but it’s the truth."

McCollister pointed to Trump’s rhetoric, urging Republicans to stand up to the hate instead of worrying about their poll numbers.

“We have a Republican president who continually stokes racist fears in his base. He calls certain countries ‘shitholes,’ tells women of color to ‘go back’ to where they came from and lies more than he tells the truth,” he wrote. “We have Republican senators and representatives who look the other way and say nothing for fear that it will negatively affect their elections. No more. When the history books are written, I refuse to be someone who said nothing.”

​McCollister said that he has no intention of switching parties, The Associated Press reported. He told The Lincoln Journal-Star that although “one or two” of his Republican colleagues voiced displeasure, he received “far more support from Republicans” than he anticipated.

There have been numerous reports, including after Trump’s latest outburst telling four congresswomen of color to “go back to the crime-infested places from which they came,” that Republicans have privately criticized Trump’s racist comments but have been unwilling to do so publicly.

​“We all like to cite Abraham Lincoln’s Republican lineage when it is politically expedient,” McCollister wrote after the mass shootings, “but NOW is the time to ACT like Lincoln and take a stand.”

Mueller made one thing clear: Republicans are a national security threat

How did Republicans react to Robert Mueller's testimony? By lying, deflecting and blocking election security bills

​SOPHIA TESFAYE - SalonJULY 26, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)

The integrity of American elections was compromised long before Donald Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, but former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday made clear that one political party is actively subverting attempts to protect our democracy.

Hours after Mueller testified about foreign election interference before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday afternoon, the Republican-controlled Senate moved to block four separate bills to defend the U.S. democratic process.

"Over the course of my career, I've seen a number of challenges to our democracy," Mueller said in his opening remarks. "The Russian government's effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious. As I said on May 29, this deserves the attention of every American."

Muller told the committee that the Russian effort “wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

He later told lawmakers that "much more needs to be done in order to protect against these intrusions — not just by the Russians, but others as well.” Researchers have already reported suspected Iranian disinformation campaigns on most major social media platforms this year.

What Mueller said, coupled with his report — which found that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in “sweeping and systematic fashion” — is breathtaking. Russia's disinformation campaign in 2016 spent more than $1 million a month, as Mueller reported in an indictment last year. When given an opportunity to question Mueller, however, some Republicans on the Intelligence Committee actually challenged him on his findings, complaining that he was baselessly defaming the Kremlin.

Even beyond their evident lack of interest in preventing election interference from happening again, Republicans seem to be defending it. This is no surprise when you recall that President Trump said as recently as last month that he'd be fine with accepting damaging information on an opponent from a foreign government.

The next day, only hours after Mueller testified to the same effect, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, a Republican, blocked two election-security bills and a measure regarding cybersecurity for Senate staff.

Democrats had hoped to pass a pair of bills requiring campaigns to alert the FBI and the Federal Election Commission if they received offers of assistance from abroad. Another bill would allow the sergeant-at-arms to offer voluntary assistance to help secure the personal devices and accounts of senators and their staff.

Hyde-Smith blocked all the bills without offering any explanation for her action or stating whether she made the motion by herself or on behalf of her party. Her move is generally in keeping with Republican arguments that Congress has already responded to election security issues, which primarily fall on state officials. Under Senate rules, any one senator can ask for consent to pass a bill but any individual senator is able to object.

Hyde-Smith then tweeted about election security Wednesday night.

U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith✔@SenHydeSmith The House hearings rehashed what we already knew. There was no collusion. Let’s move forward to fight Russian meddling, get past the partisan wild goose chases and work on issues that matter to everyday Americans.4:09 PM - Jul 24, 2019

That tweet is empty theater, as her actions prove. She talks of "moving on," as if the alarm bells Mueller has raised were solved merely by being rung, and mentions "Russian meddling" to cast an apolitical scrim over a nakedly partisan effort.

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va., condemned Hyde-Smith’s motion: “Mueller’s testimony should serve as a warning to every member of this body about what could happen in 2020, literally in our next elections.” But the committee's chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., defended Hyde-Smith on Wednesday, saying he did not think Congress needed to take further action to mitigate the threat of foreign interference.

Last month, another freshman senator, Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, blocked similar legislation. The Secure Elections Act, co-sponsored by Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and backed by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, all Republicans, would streamline cybersecurity information-sharing between federal intelligence agencies and state election authorities and provide security clearances to state election officials. It would also make relevant grants eligible to local jurisdictions.

When Republicans controlled the House last summer, they eliminated new funding for states to strengthen election security. After years of unsuccessfully trying to defund the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC), Republicans defeated a bill to extend funding for a state grant program meant to ensure that the voting process is secure.

The EAC is the sole federal agency that exclusively works to secure the integrity of the democratic process. It has worked with the FBI to examine an attack on the agency’s computer systems by a Russian-speaking hacker after Trump’s election.

Late last month, the Democratic House majority passed an election security measure that authorized an additional $600 million to states as well as $175 million every other year to bolster election infrastructure. The bill would also require voting systems to use paper ballots as a backup to electronic systems, and would require that all 50 states conduct audits after elections. A recent analysis by the Associated Press found that many of the 10,000 election jurisdictions nationwide use old or outmoded operating systems to create their ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts.

All but one Republican in the House opposed the bill. The day after Mueller’s testimony, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the bill in the Senate. ​

“Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent," McConnell said on Thursday.

McConnell is suggesting that Democrats are seeking a political advantage by trying to stop foreign election interference. He also blocked the Duty To Report Act, which would require candidates, campaign officials and their family members to notify the FBI of any offers of assistance from foreign governments.

By blocking these bill McConnell’s giving the Republicans, who face a generic seven-point disadvantage in polls of voter preference, a political benefit. Recall that when Barack Obama raised concerns about possible foreign meddling in 2016, McConnell threatened that if the then-president went public, the Senate leader would claim that Democrats were merely playing politics.

At least a dozen Republican congressional campaigns used materials stolen from Democrats by Russian hackers during the 2016 election. Several other Republican campaigns received millions in contributions from an oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2018, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called on the National Republican Congressional Committee to make a bipartisan pledge not to use stolen or hacked information in House campaigns. After months of negotiations, last September Republicans backed out, refusing to sign the pledge.

In the last few months, we have seen Republican voter fraud in North Carolina so severe that it invalidated a House election, a GOP staffer arrested for election fraud in Virginia, a Republican Texas mayor arrested for rigging an election, and Texas’ Republican secretary of state forced to resign after his botched attempt to purge voter rolls.

The Senate’s rejection of election protection efforts this week suggests that the GOP’s frequent complaints about "voter fraud" were a farce. As Salon’s Heather Digby Parton has written, “when the history of this bizarre era is written, it may very well be said that McConnell was the man behind the curtain who made it all happen.” If and when the Democrats win control of the Senate again, this issue will suddenly leap back to prominence, under the amorphous and amoral set of Republican rules.

George Carlin: Ignorant people elect ignorant leaders!!!

Dan Crenshaw wants people to believe that employers can't spend any more on workers.

JOSH ISRAEL - ThinkprogressJUL 22, 2019, 10:01 AM

​Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) claimed on Monday that a proposed raise in the federal minimum wage was “emotionally driven” and “bad for economics.” His reasoning: businesses already have a budget for how much they will spend on workers’ wages and would not possibly increase it.

The first-term Texas Republican was on Fox News, explaining why he voted against the Raise the Wage Act last week. The bill, which passed 231 to 199 on Thursday, would gradually raise the hourly federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 for most workers. If it becomes law, it is estimated that it would raise pay for tens of millions of Americans.

Crenshaw pointed to an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to make the case that a higher minimum wage would mean fewer jobs.

“Economically speaking, it causes job loss,” he warned. “The CBO estimates that up to 3.7 million jobs — 3.7 million jobs — would be lost under this kind of bill, and it’s not hard to understand why. When a business is faced with a new minimum wage, well their entire budget for salaries and payroll doesn’t, it doesn’t change. So they have to make changes themselves. They might have to cut hours and they might have to fire people, so while some people get a small increment all in crease others get 100% decrease in their wage because that’s what happens when you fire people.”

What Crenshaw failed to mention is that he selectively shared only the report’s worst case scenario. The actual CBO report predicted that the most likely scenario was that the number of jobs lost would be somewhere between zero and 3.7 million. It noted that while the research is not conclusive, many economic studies “have found little or no effect of minimum wages on employment.”

He also ignores the fact that the report predicted that — in its median prediction — 27 million Americans would get a raise and just 1.3 million would lose their jobs.

Perhaps most misleading is his argument that businesses simply have a budget that includes a fixed amount for wages and benefits, and that this can never go up. Businesses can often use more of their profits to compensate their employees. Larger corporations can scale back things like executive bonuses or private jets, if need be, to make sure their team is not living below the poverty level.

Finally, Crenshaw attempts to create the impression that the CBO predicted that more people would be in poverty with a minimum wage increase.

“It doesn’t help the people you’re trying to help. In some cases it hurts them because a lot of these people at minimum wage are adding to their household income and if they are priced out of the labor market, they can no longer add that income to their household. So a household that was not in poverty could potentially be in poverty and they studied this at the CBO as well. It’s really bad policy overall.”

But while they “studied” this at the CBO, the report’s actual findings largely contradicted Crenshaw’s argument. Overall, the analysis predicted, “The number of people with annual income below the poverty threshold in 2025 would fall by 1.3 million” under a proposal like the Raise the Wage Act.

Crenshaw suggested that the minimum wage should simply be decided at the municipal level, noting that the cost of living is well lower in Lubbock, Texas, than in San Francisco. But the Republican-controlled Texas legislature has not only refused to raise the statewide minimum wage above the federal level, it has also refused to allow local governments from doing so either.​

Mitch McConnell’s big donors are Wall Street firms — and only 9% of his funds comes from Kentucky

July 20, 2019 By Igor Derysh, Salon - Raw Story

​Wall Street contributions helped Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raise $3 million last quarter. But just 9 percent of his donations came from individual donors in his home state of Kentucky.

The biggest blocks of contributions to McConnell’s campaign between April and June came from 29 donors at New York’s Blackstone Group, who donated a combined $95,400, and from 14 executives from the financial firm KKR & Co., who contributed a combined $51,000, the Louisville Courier Journal reports. Executives from firms like Apollo Global Management and Golden Tree Asset Management contributed another combined $65,100.

It’s no wonder that McConnell is so well-liked among the New York elites his party so often castigates. McConnell helped lead the charge to slash taxes on corporations, saving big banks billions. He also led the effort to roll back parts of the Dodd-Frank law, which was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis.

McConnell also received $88,000 from Georgia-based UPS, nearly $66,000 from Indiana-based pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, and $50,000 from Florida-based private prison contractor GEO Group, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Most of the money McConnell’s campaign raised last quarter came from out-of-state donors. Just 9 percent of his contributions came from individual donors in Kentucky, according to the analysis. McConnell raised less than $182,000 from Kentuckians while receiving $281,000 from donors in New York and $216,000 from donors in Texas.

​Nearly 90 percent of McConnell’s contributions came from “big dollar” donors. Just $340,000 of his donations last quarter came from donors who gave less than $200. Meanwhile McConnell received maximum $5,600 contributions from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, Coors Brewing executive Peter Coors and NRA official Jennifer Baker, none of whom live or work in Kentucky.

Along with his own donations, McConnell raised more than $600,000 from four committees that split funds among Republican senators seeking re-election. Less than $20,000 came from donors in Kentucky.

“This is not a good sign for McConnell in 2020,” the Democratic Party said in a statement, touting the $2.5 million haul Democrat Amy McGrath raised within 24 hours of her announcement that she would challenge McConnell next year.

​It’s unclear how much McGrath has raised in total. Her first financial disclosure is not due until October. In her unsuccessful bid for a U.S. House seat last year, McGrath raised about $8.5 million, though roughly 75 percent of her big-dollar contributions came from out of state.

McConnell’s campaign manager Kevin Golden said in a statement that McGrath’s fundraising was also driven by out-of-state supporters like actresses Alyssa Milano and Bette Midler.

“Any liberal name in the phone book will raise millions from Hollywood radicals who can’t stand that Mitch McConnell is the only leader in Washington who isn’t from New York or California,” he told the Courier Journal.

McConnell raised more than $30 million in his 2014 re-election race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, who raised nearly $19 million but lost the race by 15 points. Much of McConnell’s money in that race came from dark-money groups made possible by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling.After that ruling, McConnell blocked legislation that would have required dark-money groups to disclose the identity of their donors.

Republicans will never say that racism is "racism." Basically it's because they're racist

There's nothing Donald Trump can ever say or do that's bad enough for most Republicans to admit he's racist

​AMANDA MARCOTTE - SalonJULY 17, 2019 5:30PM (UTC)

I​s there any expression of racism that Republicans will actually admit is racism? It's a question on a lot of progressive minds in the wake of Donald Trump demonizing female congresswomen of color with the "go back" canard that white nationalists and other assorted racists have long used to abuse anyone with heritage they dislike, whether that heritage is Jewish, Irish, Italian, African, Latin American or Muslim. Telling someone to "go back" is, in the ranks of racist statements, right up there with calling a person the N-word or some other rank slur. Yet, there still appears to be resistance among Republicans to admitting that is racism, which leads many on the left to wonder: If this doesn't count, then what could possibly count?

The answer, it's becoming quite clear, is that there is no limit. There's no line in the sand, no sentiment so ugly, where most Republicans will cave in and admit, OK, that's racist.

A new poll from Ipsos confirms this. While more than two-thirds of Americans correctly identify the "go back" language as racist, only 45% of Republicans agree with that assessment. Instead, 57% of Republicans agreed that these women should "leave" the country where all four are citizens, and where three of the four were born. A startlingly large majority of Republicans — 70% — also said that the word "racist" is a bad-faith effort to discredit a political opponent's views.

On Tuesday, the Democrats introduced a House resolution to condemn Trump for his remarks. All hell broke loose when Speaker Nancy Pelosi identified Trump's remarks as "racist." Republican House members exploded in outrage, claiming that the word "racist" is a personal insult against Trump, instead of a fair and accurate assessment of what he said (and has insisted on repeating).

In the end, only four Republican members voted for the resolution condemning Trump's racist remarks — and three of them are in swing districts where they barely won in 2018. All other Republicans in the House voted no, standing on the claim that "racist" was a mischaracterization of the president's words. ​

Why are Republicans so resistant to admitting that Trump is a racist and that his words and deeds are frequently racist? Like many debates, this one gets caught up in semantics. The word "racist" necessarily implies beliefs that are inherently irrational and unfair. To be blunt about it, most conservatives do not agree that certain sentiments — such as insinuating that people of color have less right to call themselves "American" or that people of color owe white people subservience and gratitude — are either irrational or unfair.

On the contrary, what has become clear in recent years is that most conservatives feel like they are hard-headed realists who are being suppressed or attacked by sanctimonious liberals when they try to speak their truth. Trump, with his willingness to air out his beliefs about the superiority of white people, is viewed as a leader in their movement to shake off the shackles of political correctness.

For liberals, this belief is irrational and cruel. Trump supporters, on the other hand, see it as rational and just. So they bristle at the word "racist", which carries an obvious level of negative judgment. To admit that these beliefs are racist is to admit that they are bad beliefs, and conservatives aren't willing to do that. Even outright white supremacists often reject the "racist" label, instead calling themselves silly things like "race realists."

This disconnect is at the heart of nearly every debate over racism in this country. Take, for instance, the ugly fight over the writer Sam Harris' embrace of Charles Murray, a right-wing political scientist who has spent much of his career peddling the idea that black people's lower average IQ scores are the result of inherent inferiority instead of a reflection of racial oppression. Harris and Murray argued that this belief was "forbidden knowledge," implicitly comparing themselves to suppressed or persecuted scientific revolutionaries like Galileo. The goal, of course, is to present themselves as objective advocates for truth instead of bigots who distort the evidence to serve racist ends. (Which is pretty clearly what they are.)

​Kobach refused to give a straight answer, giving Cuomo the viral clip he desired. But the question itself was inherently misleading. Almost nobody in contemporary America will self-identify as "racist." Kobach, for instance, is as racist a politician as they come, but he rejects the label. Everyone superficially agrees that "racist" is a bad thing to be — because it signifies irrational prejudice — and Kobach does not think that he or Trump is being irrational when they hint strongly that white people are more deserving of the designation "American" than other people.

This is why the public debate over the border crisis is so fraught. The issue isn't really over the facts of the matter, which are that Trump and his administration are targeting asylum seekers with inhumane treatment because almost all asylum seekers (at this historical moment) belong to ethnic groups Trump dislikes. The issue is over whether it's a bad thing to target people on the basis of race or ethnicity.

Sure, Trump and his allies bristle and deny that they are specifically targeting Latino immigrants. But that act is deliberately half-hearted and insincere. A more holistic look at Trump's communications to the conservative base makes clear that the actual message being sent is a lot closer to: "Hell yeah, we are targeting brown-skinned people, and we love it."

You would be hard-pressed to find a conservative who would characterize his own satisfaction at seeing this abuse as "racism." "Racism" by definition is irrational and unfair, and Trump's supporters think their stereotypes about Latino immigrants being criminals are justified.

Racism is hard to eradicate because the racist brain has a robust immune system developed to protect its bigoted beliefs. Efforts to educate about the irrationality of racist beliefs are dismissed as "political correctness." Efforts to stigmatize the expression of racist views are characterized as assaults on "free speech." Unfortunately, that also means that these kinds of public debates about race only make Trump supporters more fiercely defensive of their bigoted beliefs, which the Ipsos polll registered by showing that Republican support for Trump has intensified in the wake of his "go back" comments.

Trump's opponents need to understand what they're up against. This is not a matter of a bunch of confused or stupid people who are bamboozled by Trump and can be gently educated into being better people. (Of course there are a few conservatives at the margins who feel qualms about Trump, and they can be appealed to.) For the most part, these are hardened bigots who love what Trump is doing and cannot be shamed or browbeaten out of it. The only realistic option is for the left to out-organize the right and make sure that the majority of Americans, who reject Trump's agenda, show up to the polls to stop him.

Senate Republicans accuse Google of bias after taking thousands from its PAC

Lawmakers like Ted Cruz want the tech giant to be held accountable for supposed discrimination against conservatives.

JOSH ISRAEL - ThinkprogressJUL 17, 2019, 11:48 AM

​Senate Republicans resumed their crusade to convince Americans that the internet is biased against conservatives, holding a hearing Tuesday called “Google and Censorship through Search Engines.”

At the hearing, the Republican majority on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution accused the search engine of viewpoint discrimination because John Oliver videos are more popular than those made by Fox News personalities Diamond and Silk.

But a ThinkProgress review of campaign finance records reveals that these and other Senate Republicans have received tens of thousands of dollars from Google’s political action committee. And Google’s NetPAC actually gave more to Republican federal candidates than Democratic federal candidates in each of the past four campaign cycles.

The hearing was chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). “If Big Tech cannot provide us with evidence, clear compelling data and evidence, that it’s not playing Big Brother with its vast, immense powers, there’s no reason on Earth why Congress should give them a special subsidy through Section 230,” he demanded, suggesting that Google and other tech companies should be treated as guilty until proven innocent.

The “special subsidy” Cruz referenced is simply a legal protection that ensures search engines are not legally liable for the content of the pages they index.

After Cruz grilled Karan Bhatia, Google’s company’s vice president for government affairs & public policy at the hearing, the Texas Republican released a statement on his official website with the headline “Sen. Cruz: Google Subjects the American People to Overt Censorship and Covert Manipulation.”

But Cruz’s view that Google is biased has not stopped him from taking its money. Since his first campaign in 2012, he has taken at least $22,500 in Google PAC contributions. $10,000 of that came in his closer-than-expected 2018 re-election effort.

He was joined at the hearing by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who also repeated the widely-debunked claims of anti-conservative bias by net service providers.

In a revealing line of questioning, Blackburn made it clear that she believes fairness requires Google and other companies to present less popular conservative content as much as more popular neutral or progressive content.

“Google should equally promote video reporting in its search results whether the article is from CNN or from Fox News,” she argued. She then made the same suggestions for content from “Huffington Post or Breitbart” and “Diamond and Silk [or] John Oliver.” As Bhatia tried to explain algorithms to the Tennessee Republican, she quickly cut him off.

Blackburn has received $9,500 in Google PAC contributions since the 2012 campaign cycle.

Neither Blackburn’s nor Cruz’s offices immediately responded to requests to comment on Google’s contributions and whether the two lawmakers would continue accepting those donations in the future.

On Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also went on Fox News to complain about Google and other tech companies.

“What we learned is that Google is not being honest. What we learned is that there are studies out there showing that Google, in this country right now, is discriminating against conservative viewpoints, is discriminating against those who support the president,” Hawley claimed. “And we know Google has a history of ideological censorship and ideological discrimination. We can’t take their word for it. We have got to hold them accountable.”

Hawley has proposed legislation — ostensibly to prevent internet censorship — that would allow the Federal Trade Commission to decide which internet companies are sufficiently viewpoint neutral and to punish those it deems are not.

Not one Republican votes to allow debate on resolution condemning Trump’s racist attacks

July 16, 2019 ​By Common Dreams - Raw Story

​Not a single House Republican on Tuesday voted to proceed to debate on a Democratic resolution condemning President Donald Trump’s racist attacks on progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

The resolution (pdf)—which is on track to pass by Tuesday evening—”strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

While a handful of Republican members of Congress have condemned Trump’s Twitter attacks, which said the freshman Democrats should “go back” to the countries “from which they came,” the vast majority have either stayed silent or defended the president.

During a press conference ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Republican congressional leaders defended Trump’s remarks and said his attacks on the four congresswomen were not racist.

“I believe this is about ideology,” said House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “This is about socialism versus freedom.”

Heidi Hess, co-director of CREDO Action, said in a statement Tuesday that there is no doubt that the Trump’s comments were racist.

“Donald Trump is a racist—and he’s been a racist since long before entering the Oval Office,” said Hess. “Every single policy forced through by his administration has harmed black, brown, and immigrant communities. House Democrats must stand together with congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, and listen to these new leaders in the party who are fighting for their communities by standing up to Trump’s hate.”​

Trump and Pence's racist weekend spectacle was no accident: It's the re-election plan

What we saw over the weekend was dreadful. But it's only the beginning: The GOP truly believes this will work

​HEATHER DIGBY PARTON - SalonJULY 15, 2019 1:00PM (UTC)

If you doubted that the 2020 presidential campaign will be the ugliest you've ever experienced, the past few days should have disabused you of that. It's been a descent into grotesque racism and xenophobia on a level we haven't seen in our national politics for many decades. And it's not just a matter of Donald Trump acting out and having one of his regular tantrums. There's a rationale behind his behavior that's extremely disturbing.

As everyone is well aware by now — or should be — the refugee camps at the border are a national disgrace. If this was happening in another country (and if we had a different president) the United States would be leading the charge to condemn what was happening. The plight of families, particularly the kids, is an ongoing nightmare and Trump seems determined to exploit the pain and suffering of these vulnerable people to keep the country in a constant state of hysteria.

​I noted last week that Trump had mentioned in passing that he wanted to take reporters to a recently cleaned-up facility featuring happy, well-fed children to prove how "fake" the reports of cruel and disgusting conditions were. So last Friday officials rounded up the vice president and a couple of senators, including Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, and brought them in for an "inspection." The propaganda ploy was exactly as one might expect: The kids were in a new, air-conditioned facility and seemed to be well cared for.

But even after observing and writing about the Trump administration's depraved use of xenophobia, racism and general fear-mongering for years now, I'm never quite prepared for the depths to which they will sink. I assumed they were doing this because they believed they needed to reassure their own voters of their basic humanity. I was wrong. The visit to the kiddie-camp was a little sop to some embarrassed churchgoers and the press. What Team Trump really wanted their voters to see was another camp — the one with hundreds of single, dark-skinned men in overcrowded cages, sleeping on concrete floors, desperately trying to get the attention of the exalted visitors from Washington to let them know what was going on.

As I see it, Trump officials wanted to reassure their voters that they were treating the scary brown people with much cruelty as they could get away with.

When Vice President Pence visited a migrant detention center here Friday, he saw nearly 400 men crammed behind caged fences with not enough room for them all to lie down on the concrete ground. There were no mats or pillows for those who found the space to rest. A stench from body odor hung stale in the air. When reporters toured the facility before Pence, the men screamed that they’d been held there 40 days, some longer. They said they were hungry and wanted to brush their teeth. It was sweltering hot, but the only water was outside the fences and they needed to ask permission from the Border Patrol agents to drink.

Pence appeared to scrunch his nose when entering the facility, stayed for a moment and left.

The men told reporters they hadn't been allowed a shower for as long as 40 days in some cases. There have been reports that the CPB officers' uniforms are so inundated with the smell of hundreds of unbathed humans in a small space that the local townspeople avoid them.

Pence objected to media coverage of this event over the weekend, complaining that they failed to show the nice pictures of the happy children and instead focused on the misery of all those men caged up like animals. But you'll notice that he immediately turns to the claim that many of the men were criminals, a charge Trump himself made over the weekend as well.

I'll say it again: If they hadn't wanted people to see those men being held in inhumane conditions, they wouldn't have gone there with the press in tow.

​Lindsey Graham made it very clear what they were up to. “I don’t care if they have to stay in these facilities for 400 days," he said. "We’re not going to let those men go that I saw. It would be dangerous.” That's right: Apparently he could tell that they were dangerous just by looking at them.

He must be as psychic as acting Border Patrol head Mark Morgan, who told Tucker Carlson, “I’ve been to detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under. I’ve looked at them — and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I’ve said, ‘That is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member.’ It’s unequivocal.”

So it's no coincidence, I'm sure, that in the same week Trump announced that ICE would be conducting raids around the country to round up alleged criminals who have managed to avoid being thrown in cages, after which they will either be jailed or deported or both. Reports from major cities show that immigrant communities are now living in the grip of a terrible fear, which is half the point of doing it. The other half is to make Republican voters believe that Donald Trump is as tough and macho as he constantly proclaims himself to be.

I was prepared to call Pence's border tour the most insidious public demonstration of bigotry we'd seen in many a moon. But Trump took it to a whole other level on Sunday with his openly racist tweets about the four freshman Democratic women of color, in which he basically told them to go back to their shithole countries.

This escalation of bigotry is no coincidence. I'm not saying that Trump sat down and strategized all this. He doesn't do that. But he has a well-honed feral instinct about the ugly underbelly of American life and he knows how to make it work for him. As Peter Baker of the New York Times put it:

His assumption that the House Democrats must have been born in another country — or that they did not belong here if they were — fits an us-against-them political strategy that has been at the heart of Mr. Trump’s presidency from the start. Heading into next year’s election, he appears to be drawing a deep line between the white, native-born America of his memory and the ethnically diverse, increasingly foreign-born country he is presiding over, challenging voters in 2020 to declare which side of that line they are on.

Democrats can argue among themselves about ideology over the next year or so if they wish. But essentially, that's what the 2020 election is going to be about whether they like it or not. Trump welcomes it because he believes that most Americans are as racist as he is and that he will be rewarded for this indecency with a second term. Expect this bigoted talk to ratchet up to levels we never imagined could be uttered in 21st-century America before this is all over. It already has.

Necessary graphic posted for your convenience.
Good for just about everything a Republican says.

Texas Rep. Michael Cloud (R) falsely stated that few asylum seekers have legitimate claims of political persecution, and that their cases should therefore merit only a very brief evaluation lasting 30 minutes to two hours maximum.

The House Freedom Caucus member combined debunked statistics and a misunderstanding of what makes people eligible for asylum in a Fox News interview on Wednesday morning.

“Eighty percent, 90% are not true asylum cases,” Cloud claimed. “The whole point of asylum is fleeing political persecution. We have compassion for those people looking for a better life. [But] that is not what asylum laws are for.”

The 80% number appears to be a reference to a debunked argument by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Based on 2017 immigration court statistics that showed 20.22% of asylum claims were approved that year, Sessions deduced that this meant about 80% were without “merit.”

​As PolitiFact noted last July, immigration experts agreed that there were many reasons why those other cases were not granted other than just lack of merit. In 2016, about 28% of asylum cases were approved.

Moreover, Cloud’s claim this week that asylum is only for those fleeing “political persecution” is flat-out wrong. According to the Trump administration’s own U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) webpage, “political opinion” is just one of five categories for asylum. Applicants need only show that they have suffered persecution or have legitimate reason to fear that they will suffer persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Cloud took his argument a step further on Wednesday, suggesting that since so few cases have merit, their cases should be quickly disposed of by border agents. He said he had written to the Trump administration to urge officials to train Border Patrol agents to be immigration judges “so that that processes isn’t a two- or three-year process, but rather it’s more of a 30 minute, couple of hour process.”

Cloud has previously railed against the House Democratic majority for “rushing bills through” without 72 hours of consideration.

The Texas congressman’s official biography describes him as a “longtime defender of American values” and notes that he is himself married to a “naturalized citizen.” In a Roll Call profile last September, he said his wife emigrated from Mexico on a fiancee visa and complained that, since agents had never seen one before, the couple “were at the border for two hours.”

“That was just the beginning of a many year process of going through immigration,” he told the publication. “I think once we get into these policy discussions, I’ll be able to bring in a human side to it.”

It is not a coincidence that...

guillaumeb - demo underground

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, workers generally make less money.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, women's rights to make health choices are severely restricted.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, injured or disabled people are treated as 2nd class citizens.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, it is much harder for minorities to vote.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, businesses are easily able to exploit their workers.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, taxpayer subsidies for the rich are called smart politics.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, taxpayer help for the poor and needy are called welfare.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, union member ship is lower.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, statues commemorating slavery and slave owners exist.

It is not a coincidence that in states that are led by the GOP, the non-rich suffer from lack of access to health care.

No, these things are not coincidences. They are the obvious result of a Party that serves the needs of the 1% exclusively

hypocrites forever!!!

After weeks of decrying the ‘humanitarian crisis’ at the border, House Republicans reject border aidThe GOP lawmakers who demanded immediate action now are accusing House Democrats of playing politics.​JOSH ISRAEL - ThinkprogressJUN 26, 2019, 9:30 AM

Despite labeling the current situation at the southern border a “humanitarian crisis,” 191 members of the House Republican caucus on Wednesday night voted against a $4.5 billion emergency aid package meant to provide proper care for migrants being held in horrific conditions inside U.S. detention facilities.

The bill eventually passed by a margin of 230-195.

House Republicans have for months demanded billions in emergency supplemental funding to address the massive border crisis, which is largely of President Donald Trump’s own making. But given a chance to address it, Republicans this week demurred.

Republicans argued that Trump would not sign the bill, as it was focused on humanitarian aid rather than a punitive approach.

​Democrats were “pushing partisan bills to score political points and avoiding doing the hard work of actually making law,” said GOP Rep. Tom Cole (OK) on Wednesday night.

“[P]assing a partisan bill through this chamber won’t solve the problem,” he added.

As massive numbers of Central American migrants come to the United States seeking asylum — in part due to the Trump administration’s indifference to the conditions in their home countries — the president’s cruel approach to immigrant kids has been thrust again into the spotlight.

Recently, advocates and immigration lawyers have reported stark conditions at various immigration detention facilities, including claims of children being fed uncooked food, being denied soap and toothbrushes, and being forced to sleep on the floor under foil blankets with the lights on all day and night. Facilities were described as dirty and overcrowded, and many children have fallen ill repeatedly.

The Trump administration has been criticized for its treatment of migrants in the past, particularly after a number of children and adults died in government detention facilities. Its practice of separating children from their families at the border has been labeled inhumane by various humanitarian groups worldwide.

​With little appropriated money left, Trump and House Republicans have demanded additional tax dollars to deal with the overcrowded detention facilities and other challenges.

In January, during Trump’s record-breaking partial government shutdown, the House GOP communications team blamed the Democratic majority for ignoring “the humanitarian crisis at the border.” In May, they released a set of talking points called “Ending the Humanitarian Crisis at the Border,” demanding immediate Congressional action.

And just this month, they complained that “virtually everyone in America recognizes that there’s a humanitarian crisis at the border, with one notable exception: Democrats in Congress.”

​“Democrats have blocked GOP-led legislation that would fund humanitarian aid – not wall funding – for the southern border 15 times, and their majority refuses to address the situation despite pleas for congressional action,” they claimed.

On June 18, 2019, House Republicans held a press conference demanding that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) allow a vote on border humanitarian funding. On Tuesday, Pelosi and Democratic majority in the House brought a bill to the floor that would indeed provide billions in humanitarian aid to fund basic needs like food, water, and shelter. It also included standards for how refugee children are cared for and how contractors are held accountable for their care for migrants.

The bill passed the House, mostly along party lines. Four Democrats — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — voted against the bill, uncomfortable with supporting any funding that might enable the detention of migrant children.Three Republicans — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Will Hurd of Texas, and Christopher Smith of New Jersey — voted for the emergency aid.

Trump immediately denounced the bill, accusing Democrats of not doing “anything at all about Border Security.”

“Too bad the Dems in Congress won’t do anything at all about Border Security,” he tweeted. “They want Open Borders, which means crime. But we are getting it done, including building the Wall! More people than ever before are coming because the USA Economy is so good, the best in history.”

​The House bill’s prospects are uncertain with the Republican-controlled Senate, which is expected to vote on a separate $4.6 billion aid package later this week.

​The gap between Texas’ Hispanic and white populations continued to narrow last year when the state gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident.

With Hispanics expected to become the largest population group in Texas as soon as 2022, new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau showed the Hispanic population climbed to nearly 11.4 million — an annual gain of 214,736 through July 2018 and an increase of 1.9 million since 2010.

The white population, meanwhile, grew by just 24,075 last year. Texas still has a bigger white population — up to 11.9 million last year — but it has only grown by roughly 484,000 since 2010. The white population’s growth has been so sluggish this decade that it barely surpassed total growth among Asian Texans, who make up a tiny share of the total population, in the same time period.

The estimates come as lawmakers begin to sharpen their focus on the 2021 redistricting cycle, when they’ll have to redraw the state’s congressional and legislative maps to account for population growth. And they highlight the extent to which the demographics of the state continue to shift against the Republican Party.

Beyond the jarring headline, the facts are essentially presented as they are. Growth among the Hispanic population continues to dwarf that of "whites." And that this should portend ill for the Republican Party, if voting patterns continue as they are present.​

What Cornyn is doing, however, is obvious as well. Stoking fear for these changing demographics. It's what people like him do.

From Kyle Kashuv to AOC, Republicans want to turn all discussion of race into pointless culture-war debates

​SOPHIA TESFAYE - SalonJUNE 20, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)

It wasn’t slavery. They are concentration camps. Racial slurs are not a youthful indiscretion.

This week has seen a series of culture-war debates dominate the discourse only to be derailed by bad faith arguments about semantics.

First, on Monday, nearly all of the right-wing ecosystem was engaged to defend the honor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior and gun rights activists Kyle Kashuv after he revealed that his admission to Harvard had been rescinded. At least one of Kashuv’s classmates in Parkland, Florida, released a number of text messages from him which included racist and misogynistic attacks on fellow students, including the description of black athletes as “niggerjocks.”

Kashuv's texts included repeated use of the word “nigger,” including the observation: “like im really good at typing nigger ok like practice uhhhhhh makes perfect son??!!”

New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that by rejecting Kashuv for his comments, Harvard had set an impossible standard.

“That’s why we try not to judge people by what they did in their worst moment, but rather by how they respond to their worst moment,” Brooks wrote.

Conservative outlets from the Washington Examiner to the National Review were quick with columns expressing outrage over the injustice of stripping a young right-wing icon from his seat at the country’s most elite academic institution. They said little about Kashuv's repeated expression of vile and hateful sentiments just two years ago, which is the actual substance of the case. The entirety of the conversation instead revolved around the harm to Kashuv’s reputation and ignored any harm he might potentially have visited on future classmates.

That was the point. By handwaving about Harvard’s admission policy, conservatives were able to dismiss the real scandal of yet another one of their rising stars caught in a racism controversy as an overreaction to "profanity" used by typical teenagers.

“Niggerjock” is not typical teen-speak, but conservatives know that. The countless ensuing responses that had to explain such a basic concept to supposedly high-minded political thinkers this week were necessary but ultimately a waste. What should have been a conversation about the enduring edginess of racism, even amongst some members of Generation Z, was derailed into a debate about how harmless racial slurs are and how little accountability certain teenagers are expected to own.

The very next day, conservatives were once again united in outrage over an issue of semantics, while ignoring the substance.

"The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border ⁠— and that is exactly what they are," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Monday night in an Instagram live video responding to recent reports of overcrowding and maltreatment at the facilities.

​This time Republican leadership in the House of Representatives piled on to criticize her use of the term "concentration camp," not her description of the atrocities occurring at these sites.

"I think Congresswoman AOC needs to apologize," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said. "Not only to the nation but to the world. She does not understand history.”

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the third-ranking House Republican, tweeted: "Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust."

When actor George Takei, who was placed in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, defended Ocasio-Cortez by pointing out that even then those camps did not separate families as the Trump administration, conservative commentators jumped to explain the difference between an internment camp and a concentration camp to him.

Despite the overwhelming current of coverage Ocasio-Cortez’s comments generated, the conditions at these camps still haven’t been highlighted by the press or her conservative detractors. Her point has been ignored and that is deliberate.

Even in official discourse sanctioned by the federal government, like the House hearing on reparations for descendants of slavery and segregation on Wednesday, Republicans successfully managed to hijack the discussion over issues with semantics.

H.R. 40, a bill that aims to create a committee to study and develop proposals for reparations, was finally granted a hearing on Juneteenth, the annual holiday meant to commemorate when the last slaves were freed, nearly three years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Democrats called economists, academics and activists who have studied the issues for decades to testify. Republicans, who largely abstained from attending the hearing, called only a former NFL player and current college student to testify against the need for redress.

Coleman Hughes, a Columbia University undergrad and columnist for the right-wing outlet Quillette, dismissed economic and health disparities as a natural occurrence of society unrelated to race or racism. This came right after author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates had testified about the devastating legacy of redlining, white flight and employment discrimination on the African-American community, even years after the official end of Jim Crow segregation.

Burgess Owens, a former Oakland Raider turned frequent Fox News guest, inexplicably blamed BET, rappers and baby mamas for the depressed economic status of the black community. He repeatedly brought up the Democratic Party and what he claimed was its support for abortion and open borders to call the party racist and an impediment to progress.

The Republicans who invited such experts displayed even more frustrating dishonesty about the issue.

​Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, discounted the need for hate crime legislation and advocated for the death penalty, tool of a criminal justice system built on racial injustice, with his allotted time. The highest ranking Republican on the committee, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, used his opening statement to insist that the few Republicans who bothered to show up were operating in good faith, before dismissing reparations as unconstitutional. He then cited Martin Luther King Jr. to call for black excellence as a means to fight continued racism.

These are not good faith arguments and they don't even deal with the substance of the matter at hand. As one witness responded, the bootstrap myth is a falsehood meant to redirect focus away from the root of the problem: systemic racism.

These hearings are not just about slavery and the first proposed approach is only a study. Yet Republicans refuse even to allow for that.

It is remarkable how unserious the GOP is when faced with real issues of race. But watching elected Republicans squirm when slavery is mentioned or when the memory of concentration camps is invoked makes it worth the effort. These conversations are sorely needed in a country that would elect Donald Trump.

​At least a dozen Republican congressional campaigns used materials stolen from Democrats by Russian hackers during the 2016 election. Several other Republican campaigns received millions in contributions from an oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2018, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called on the National Republican Congressional Committee to make a bipartisan pledge not to utilize stolen or hacked information in House elections. After months of negotiations, in September of 2018, House Republicans backed out and refused to sign the pledge. These are just some of the often-overlooked reasons why Republicans have been so reluctant to criticize President Trump’s willingness to accept “dirt” on an opposing candidate from a foreign government.

One day after Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he wouldn’t necessarily go to the FBI in the event his re-election campaign is contacted by foreign groups, Senate Republicans killed legislation to safeguard American democracy from foreign interference.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., failed in his attempt to unanimously pass a bill that would require candidates to report election assistance offered by foreign governments to federal officials. Under Warner’s Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act, campaigns would have to report contacts with foreign nationals who are trying to make campaign donations or coordinate with the campaign to the Federal Election Commission, which would then notify the FBI. It’s already illegal for electoral campaigns to knowingly accept help from a foreign entity or power.

“This legislation is pretty simple, even for this body. It would require that any presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government has an obligation to report that offer of assistance to law enforcement, specifically the FBI,” Warner said on Thursday. “We ought to make clear that if any foreign power tries to intervene again in an election, the least we can do is ask for a requirement to report it to law enforcement.”

Warner’s request for unanimous consent to pass a bill that would make it illegal not to report an offer of foreign help was blocked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a Republican elected last year. (She replaced Trump critic Bob Corker, who retired rather than run again.)

“All of us know, if you were to ever be contacted by a foreign entity, your first call is the FBI,” Blackburn had said to reporters hours before blocking the bill. “I don’t care if it’s Russia, Norway, China, whomever.”

Blackburn, who was a part of the Trump transition team, explained her objection to a bill that would make it harder for a person to cheat their way into a position as an effort to protect campaign contractors, door knockers and — most curiously — the group of undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

“We are all for free and fair and honest elections. These reporting requirements are over-broad,” Blackburn said. “Presidential campaigns would have to worry about disclosure at a variety of levels. So many different levels.” Blackburn complained that “the unanimous consent that was presented is over-broad, and this is something should be done in a thoughtful way. It should be done in a bipartisan way.”

But unanimous consent is bipartisan, by definition. If she wanted to be bipartisan, she could have allowed the law to go through. But the issue of allowing foreign interference in our elections seems wholly partisan now.

Responding to Blackburn’s objection to his resolution, Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his colleague’s “reading of my legislation is not accurate … the only thing that would have to be reported is if the agent of a foreign government or national offered something that was already prohibited.”

​“I’m deeply disappointed that the majority has rejected this request before I can even lay out why I think it’s needed,” Warren said.

He added: “If there are ways to improve this legislation to reach an agreement, I am wide open to changes to make it better.”

Other Democrats expressed outrage at Blackburn’s opposition to the resolution.

“Today is a new low,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., urging Republicans to “rethink this” because Democrats plan to bring up the request again.

“How disgraceful it is that our Republican friends cower before this president when they know that the things he does severely damage democracy,” Schumer asked. “When a president feels it’s more important to win an election than conduct a fair election, we’re a step further away from democracy and toward autocracy. That’s what dictators believe, winning at all cost.”

what does this say about the people who vote for this hypocrite/liar?

Ohio congressman who impeached Clinton says Trump’s lies are okay because they weren’t under oath

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) did not just vote to impeach President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in 1998; he was one of the House Managers who unsuccessfully prosecuted the case before the United States Senate.

Now in his 12th term in the House, Chabot does not believe President Donald Trump should be impeached. His reasoning: Trump’s lies don’t matter because they were not under oath.

In an interview with The Atlantic this week, Chabot said he stands by his efforts to impeach Clinton. “I do stand by it,” he sad. “I think he did commit an impeachable offense — that’s why I voted that way.”

But despite the 10 instances of possible obstruction involving Trump, documented in special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, Chabot said that the sees no reason to impeach the current president because Trump did not swear to tell the truth and because Mueller did not expressly tell Congress to impeach.

​“[T]there are a lot of differences,” he argued. “President Clinton put his hand on the Bible, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And then he lied. He perjured himself.”

“And we had the Starr report, which was somewhat similar to the Mueller report, and there were 11 grounds on which he recommended that we move forward on impeachment,” he continued. “Trump didn’t perjure himself. He was never under oath. And also Mueller did not recommend that there was an impeachable offense. So both things.”

Despite repeated requests by Mueller for an interview with the president and Trump’s public statements that he would be happy to do so under oath, Trump refused to sit down with the special counsel in person, responding instead to a series of written questions.

In his report, Mueller described Trump’s answers as “inadequate.”

While Trump may not have lied under oath, the latest Washington Post count shows he has lied at an unprecedented clip: 10,796 false claims in the first 869 days of his presidency.Asked point blank this week whether he would acknowledge “that perhaps the president has not been honest at all times,” Chabot replied, “I’m not prepared to go there.”

REALITY,, IN YOUR FACE!!!

GOP Paid Millions to Operative Who Pushed Census Question Aimed to Help “Whites”

BY Igor Derysh, SalonPUBLISHED June 7, 2019

The gerrymandering expert who was revealed to be behind the push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census — on the premise that it would help Republicans and “non-Hispanic whites” — was paid millions by the Republican National Committee until his death last year.

After Thomas Hofeller passed away last summer, his daughter discovered files on his hard drive revealing that he authored a study showing that a census citizenship question would help Republican gerrymandering. He pushed the Trump administration to add the question to the 2020 census. After Hofeller’s previously unreported role in the census issue was revealed, Mother Jones found Federal Election Commission filings showing that the Republican Party had paid him more than $2 million for his work.

Hofeller, who wrote that adding the question would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” was on the RNC payroll from June 2009 until his death last August. He had previously worked as a redistricting consultant for the RNC between the 1980s and early 2000s.

​According to the filings, the RNC continued to pay him for “legal and compliance” work after he left his official position and right up until his death. He earned $422,000 after Trump’s inauguration, receiving regular monthly payments of $22,247.

During that time, Hofeller was paid by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet owned by billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, to study how to implement congressional maps based only on the number of voting-age citizens rather than on a state’s total population.

Hofeller, who was behind numerous controversial gerrymanders like the one struck down in North Carolina because it was based on race, authored a study in 2015 which stated that basing maps only on the number of adult citizens rather than the total population “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” according to court filings.

After crafting the study and while being paid by the RNC, Hofeller lobbied Trump’s transition team to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census, according to last year’s testimony from former transition aide Mark Neuman.

Neuman testified that Hofeller told him that adding the question would be necessary to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act and increase Hispanic turnout, despite writing exactly the opposite in his study months earlier.

Files found on Hofeller’s hard drive showed that he was integral to the Trump administration’s dubious justification for adding the question. After he submitted several memos to the Trump team presenting arguments that could be used to justify implementing the question, an entire paragraph from one of his memos appeared verbatim in a draft letter from the Justice Department urging the Census Bureau to add the question.

The question was ultimately put on hold by federal courts and will now be ruled upon by the Supreme Court. The conservative majority on the high court appeared likely to uphold the question when they heard arguments in April.

The ACLU, the New York Immigration Coalition and other groups seeking to block the question have attempted to enter the files Hofeller’s daughter discovered into evidence in their New York lawsuit. They also requested an expedited discovery process in the case in hopes of finding more evidence that might be used to pause the Supreme Court’s review of the case. Their request was denied by a judge and the Supreme Court is still expected to rule on the case this month, The Daily Beast reported.

It is unclear if the Supreme Court will consider the new evidence found on Hofeller’s hard drive, since it was not available when it first heard arguments in April.

“There are precedents on both sides of the question. Sometimes, the Supreme Court admits new evidence; other times, it doesn’t. Unlike lower courts, the Supreme Court can, more or less, do whatever it wants,” Jay Michaelson wrote at The Daily Beast, adding, “It’s quite possible that a majority of the court will simply decide the case on the evidence in front of it, rendering all of the new discoveries legally irrelevant.”

GOP launches its new branding for 2020. Soph0571 - Demo Underground

Republicans who voted against the Dream Act represent over 600,000 people who would have benefited

​The House of Representatives passed a historic bill Tuesday night that would offer a path to citizenship for more than 2.5 million young undocumented immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” and immigrants protected under temporary programs.

The vote on the American Dream and Promise Act was mostly along party lines, and 187 Republicans voted against the legislation. These 187 Republicans represent approximately 603,500 immigrants who would have benefited from the bill.

The Dream and Promise Act marks the first step toward repairing the damage done to undocumented immigrant communities living in the United States. Under the bill, undocumented immigrants who were under the age of 18 upon arrival in the United States would be granted conditional permanent resident status for 10 years and cancel any removal proceedings so long as they: have been continuously physically present in the United States for four years preceding the date of the enactment of the bill, were 17 years or younger when they first arrived in United States, pass a background check, have a clean criminal record, and graduate from high school or an academic equivalent.

In order to obtain lawful permanent resident status, Dreamers must graduate from a U.S. college or technical school, complete two years of military service, or be employed for at least three years with 75% of that time under an authorized work visa.

​The bill would also provide beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) with lawful permanent resident status if they have been in the United States for three years before the bill is enacted and either had or were eligible for TPS on September 25, 2016 or had DED status as of September 28, 2016. TPS and DED are temporary immigration programs that provide relief to immigrants from countries devastated by natural disasters, civil war, or disease.

Trump has sought to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — an Obama-era program that provided certain undocumented youth temporary work authorization and deportation relief— as well as TPS and DED, leaving the lives of millions of U.S. residents at the whims of court injunctions. Forced to comply with federal court orders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) extended TPS for residents from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, Honduras, and Nicaragua until January 2020 and March 2020 for Nepalese immigrants.

The immigrants who stand to benefit from the latest DREAM Act and their households contribute $17.4 billion in federal taxes and $9.7 billion in state and local taxes per year. They hold also $75.4 billion in spending power.

The University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, in collaboration with the Center For American Progress, published district-level data for how many Dreamers, TPS, and DED holders would be put on a path to citizenship under the Dream and Promise Act. (Editor’s Note:

ThinkProgress is an editorially independent newsroom housed within the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)[...]

By Tom Boggioni - raw story​May 26, 2019

​According to a report at Politico, despite Republican Party claims that they are actively trying to bridge the gender gap with Democrats, they are largely ignoring conservative women who want to run for office under the GOP banner.

In an interview with the website, Republican Leigh Brown said she was initially encouraged to run for a vacant House seat representing North Carolina only to be abandoned after she began her campaign.

“Brown jumped into a crowded Republican primary — and the people who had given her hope were nowhere to be found. Among those who disappeared, she said, was Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who launched an initiative this year to elect more Republican women,” the report states.

“That’s a little frustrating to have initial conversations and then follow up and be ghosted,” Brown lamented. “I put my real estate business on hold. I’ve dinged my own reputation in order to put myself forward as a public servant, and then you find out exactly how lonely it is to run for office.”

According to Politico, the GOP made big plans to bring more female candidates into the fold after watching a massive class of Democratic woman sworn in after the 2018 “Blue Wave” midterms, but their efforts have faltered since then.

Part of the problem is that the GOP is providing no infrastructure to recruit and support female candidates and don’t seem very interested in changing their ways.

“GOP consultants and candidates acknowledge their recruitment and resources lag far behind Democrats,” Politico reports. “And no centralized group exists to provide hiring advice, social media guidance, press training, or messaging tactics to candidates. Democrats, on the other hand, have the behemoth EMILY’s List network, as well as groups focused on recruiting immigrants, women of color, female veterans and more.”

A few of the 13 female House members who are Republicans claim they are doing what the can to swell their numbers, with Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) launching a “Suburban Caucus … to craft an economic-driven agenda for female candidates running in suburban swing districts.”

The report also notes that there is infighting among conservative groups over which candidates to select for vacant seats and women often get left out in the cold.

“Why do you have all these groups working against each other?” explained a female Republican consultant who wished to remain anonymous. “Why not all get along and be [like] EMILY’s List — and be recruiting women, mentoring people, electing women?”

By Daniel Newhauser - vice news​May 23, 2019

​WASHINGTON — In the days since Alabama’s passage of the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, national Republicans have tried to distance themselves from its most controversial provisions that would outlaw abortion even in the case of rape or incest.

Now, there are clear signs that is changing. Secret talking points obtained by VICE News show national Republicans are preparing to defend the law, which has not yet taken effect, but will almost certainly be struck down by the courts. The law, which only allows abortions if a pregnancy poses a "serious health risk" to the mother, was passed last week by Alabama legislators in hopes of mounting a Supreme Court challenge to Roe v. Wade.

According to the document distributed by the largest GOP ideological conservative caucus in the House, conservative leaders are urging members to defend the Alabama law, using the justification that an abortion would be committing more violence against a woman who was raped or survived incest.

“Committing a second violent act with abortion to a woman who has already been victimized by an act of rape or incest could physically or psychologically wound her further,” the document states. “Every single child should be afforded the opportunity to live, regardless of how they were conceived.”

The document was produced by the Republican Study Committee, a longtime caucus consisting of conservative House Republicans, who met Tuesday to discuss this and other matters. Entitled “Messaging in the Minority,” the document offers “messaging guidance” on “our pro-life platform” and contains a note stating it is “strictly OFF-THE-RECORD” and not to be printed or reproduced by/for media.”

Roughly 70% of House Republicans are members of the Republican Study Committee, with more than 140 members listed as dues-paying members on the group’s website.

A spokeswoman for the Republican Study Committee declined to comment.

​The guidance advises that Alabama’s law is “bold new pro-life legislation.” “Unfortunately, the media is attempting to use these new developments to create ‘gotcha moments’ for Republicans and a divide within our party,” it states.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told VICE News that he has not seen the talking points, but that he does not support abortion laws without exemptions in the case of rape and incest. But he said other Republicans are free to have their own opinions.

“I believe in pro-life. I believe in the protection of children. I do not believe in infanticide, I believe in three exemptions only: Life of the mother, rape and incest,” he said. “Members run and take positions. It's a personal position, and they have to stake out their own personal position, just as I have.”

McCarthy is the only GOP leader who is not a member of the RSC, with Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney and Vice Chairman Mark Walker and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Gary Palmer all listed as members.

It’s not clear whether any members of leadership were at the meeting in the Capitol where the messaging guidance was discussed. A meeting agenda obtained by VICE News noted that they also discussed a Scalise-sponsored anti-carbon tax bill and a Palmer measure that would strip some federal funding from airports that do not comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers of Washington, a former member of GOP leadership and a current member of the Republican Study Committee, said she was not at the meeting but that she does not support the messaging contained in the document.

“I've always supported that exemption,” she told VICE News. She would advise her colleagues that, “I think we stay focused on what we're doing at the federal level and the states; that's the laboratories of democracy.”

​The document notes that some Republicans may disagree with aspects of the state law but that it is important for the GOP to present a unified front on the bigger issue.

“While some Republicans may disagree with the timing and/or particular legal strategies being implemented with the various state measures, it is critical our members speak with clarity and conviction about the broader issue of the sanctity and inherent value of every human life,” the document reads.

Other Republicans welcomed the discussion. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, who has been an anti-abortion advocate for decades and has drawn controversy for trying to narrow the definition of rape to “forcible rape,” noted that he thinks there’s a political upside to messaging the issue in new ways.

“I am for, to the maximum extent possible, protecting life,” said Smith, who is not a member of the RSC. “What I want to do is have that debate on the floor. Stay tuned.”

Democrats, however, are sure to jump on the talking points. The party is having a reckoning of its own, with Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos on Tuesday bowing out of a fundraiser for anti-abortion Democrat Rep. Dan Lipinski under pressure from the left.

Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, the co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-choice Caucus, said Republicans may try to distance themselves from the state laws, but it will not work.

“It's not for a bunch of Republican, mostly male members of Congress to be telling rape victims what is or is not in the best interest,” said DeGette. “The state laws are outrageous. They hurt women … I think the fact that National Republicans are trying to run away from them is not going to work.”

​The Rot In The Republican Party Started Long Before Fox 'News' And Trump

Sorry James Comey, but William Barr didn't need to spend time with Donald Trump to become who he is now.

By Steve M. - crooks & liars​5/03/19 5:30am

James Comey believes that Donald Trump has a singular gift for corrupting other people, and that William Barr fell prey to it:

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged.... Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.

From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him....

Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear....... to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

I think the simplest explanation is that [Barr is] just another example of an American whose brain has been rotted by consuming too much right-wing media. He’s defending Trump for the same reason that Fox News says he should be defended. Trump is a victim of a witch hunt—a plot to destroy him hatched by liberals and Obama holdovers in the FBI and Justice Department. I think he actually believes this, which would explain his behavior better than the theory that Trump corrupted his morals....

Watching cable news, I see a phalanx of former Justice Department officials who are somewhere between flummoxed and flabbergasted by Barr’s behavior. They can’t imagine what has happened to him. I think the answer is simple. He sat in his living room watching Sean Hannity and it destroyed his brain, his moral compass, and his potential worth as a public servant.

This is closer to the truth, but the rot began long before Hannity got a national TV gig. You could trace it as far back as Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, but it was certainly in place by the Reagan years, when Interior Secretary James Watt said, "I don't use the words 'Democrats' and 'Republicans.' It's 'liberals' and 'Americans.'" No one needed an explanation of that because a significant portion of the Republican electorate had arrived at the same conclusion -- that liberals (a term increasing used interchangeably with "Democrats") were congenitally disloyal to America. That's why they'd voted for Reagan, wasn't it?

The fiction that we all agreed on our common American-ness was still in force in those years, so this and other utterances by Watt were considered gaffes, and soon he was forced to resign. But the message wasn't very different from that of the president, and it was identical to the message of Rush Limbaugh, the man who effectively took over the leadership of the Republican Party after Reagan left office (despite the fact that Reagan's vice president had been elected president). Then there was Newt Gingrich (who declared total war on Democrats in the House), followed by Fox, and you know the rest.

Even as Democratic presidents and congressional leaders sought compromise and GOP buy-in, Republicans treated politics as a zero-sum game and a blood sport. Barr helped quash the Iran-contra scandal because he believed a generation ago that Republicans must prevail at all costs; he still believes that. He didn't need to spend time in rooms with Donald Trump to become who he is now -- it's the default mode for all Republicans.

republican PATRIOTISM!!!

Audio obtained by the Guardian shows Matt Shea said ‘communists are lying in wait’ and associate told audience to collect ‘an AR-15’ and ‘rounds of ammo’

Jason Wilson in Portlandthe guardianWed 1 May 2019 01.00 EDT

​Washington state Republican representative Matt Shea and several associates regaled an audience with conspiracy theories, separatist visions and exhortations for listeners to arm themselves ahead of a looming civil war, at a gathering at a remote religious compound in the north-east of the state last year.

In recordings obtained by the Guardian, Shea and Jack Robertson, also known as radio personality John Jacob Schmidt, invoked their visions and fears of a violent leftist revolt in speeches at the 2018 God and Country event in Marble.

The Guardian last week published leaked chat records in which Shea and Robertson were revealed to have discussed the use of surveillance, “psyops” and violence against liberal and leftist activists.

Robertson – who aired fantasies of extreme violence against liberal activists in the leaked chats – told the audience at the 2018 event that they should be prepared for civil war.

In his speech at God and Country last June, which immediately followed Shea’s speech, Robertson said: “Of course, you all know that you should have an AR-15 and a thousand rounds of ammo, right? Because Antifa is kicking up and getting ready to defend, right?”

Shea’s speech flirted with themes of civil war, but mostly focused on the idea of separating eastern Washington out into a separate political entity, with the view of having “an entire geographic area repent”.

He began by proposing “a simple idea that may make you cringe a little at first. And that idea is that liberty must be kept by force.”

Shea said the reason America was no longer a “beacon of Christianity”, was “because of compromise. And it’s not knowing that the communists are training, they’re planning, they’re organizing and they are lying in wait.”

​He added: “If you don’t believe that, then you don’t understand what is really wrong with America.”

The Guardian’s revelations about the chat records prompted widespread condemnation from all levels of politics in Washington.Governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee, lieutenant governor Cyrus Habib, the state Democratic party, and House Democrats all condemned Shea’s remarks, along with Spokane county’s Republican sheriff, Ozzie Knezovich.

The state house Republican leader JT Wilcox condemned talk of violence in the chats, but stopped short of criticizing Shea. On Friday, Republicans reportedly announced that they would conduct a review of Shea’s action at the end of the legislative session.

Shea first responded late on Monday night with a brief statement on Facebook calling the news “an extremely misleading hit piece”, claiming that he had received death threats in the past, and a link to an Australian white nationalist website post which criticizes this writer. It came almost a week after he was first contacted by the Guardian for comment.

On far-right websites, podcasts, and in media interviews, Shea,Robertson and another participant in the chat, Anthony Bosworth, claimed that Shea did not see the parts of the chat where they threatened violence.

However, the records show Shea to have been added at the beginning of the conversation, and to have posted immediately before and after the most elaborate evocations of violence.

In his 2018 speech, Robertson said the audience should prepare for the threat of civil war. “It’s a fact that what we see on the political landscape and our cultural landscape are indicative of a coming civil war,” he said.

Robertson is a close ally of Shea’s. In a phone conversation with the Guardian earlier this month, he said: “I consider representative Shea to be a friend.” The pair are regular guests on each other’s broadcasts on a local Christian network, and often share a stage at “patriot movement” events.

Shea, who rarely talks to reporters, did not respond to requests for comment.

Asked earlier this month whether he still stood by his remarks at God and Country, Robertson said: “Oh, of course I stand by that statement. I think it’s the duty of every American. From the beginning of this country every male was armed and had adequate arms and ammunition to defend himself and his community.”

At Marble, Robertson blamed Democrats for the supposed impending insurrection, saying: “Maxine Waters says we need to take the struggle to them and get in their face and be confrontational and Antifa and the communists are responding to that message, are they not?”

But Shea mostly addressed his long-held plan to divide Washington, with the eastern half to be renamed “Liberty State”. In more public presentations in the Liberty State campaign, Shea has often given economic, cultural, and political reasons for the separation. In this speech he appeared to propose a more radical vision, which was divinely ordained.

“Think about it. God has established the boundaries of the, what people call, The American Redoubt,” referring to the political movement he is associated with, initiated by survivalist author James Wesley Rawles,which encourages “Christian patriots” to move en masse to the mountain west.

“I think it is our job just to implement it,” he added.

God and Country has been held as an annual event at the private compound known as Marble Country, at Marble in Stevens county, Washington. The facility was developed to house an intentional community attached to a church, the Marble Community Fellowship, which was founded in 1991 and led ever since by Barry and Anne Byrd.

During the 1990s, the Byrds associated with adherents of the Christian Identity movement, which interprets the Bible as establishing a racial hierarchy, wherein Jews and blacks are enemies of the white race, who are the true Israelites.

Though it is not clear that the Byrds still embrace Christian Identity beliefs, they do still adhere to Dominionist theology, which holds that the United States should be a theocracy: governed by Christians, according to divine law.

In a broadcast immediately after Trump’s election in 2016, Shea hosted Byrd on his radio broadcast and podcast, where they reflected on the opportunity the election presented.

“We’re here to take dominion under Christ,” Byrd reminded Shea at one point in the broadcast. “As you know, that has to do with government.”

the other traitor!!!

How deep does the Russia collusion go? To McConnell?

by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos - alternet​April 19, 2019

On this Mueller collusion report day, it’s worth remembering the lengths to which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went to cover up what he knew before the election. The Russians were working to elect Donald Trump, and American intelligence agencies knew it. They told McConnell that. He threatened them with all-out political warfare if they tried to make that information public.

In the report, Mueller details Paul Manafort, then Trump campaign manager, instructing his deputy Rick Gates to get internal polling information from battleground states to Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch and friend of Putin, through go-between Konstantin Kilimnik. “Manafort expected Kilimnik to share that information with others in Ukraine and with Deripaska,” Mueller found. And Gates did it.

So what does this have to do with McConnell? Good question. Fast forward to January of this year, when Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer forced a vote in the Senate on Trump’s Treasury Department’s decision to lift sanctions on companies linked to—you got it—Oleg Deripaska. One of those companies is aluminum manufacturing giant Rusal. The vote failed, with McConnell voting no.

Fast forward again to this week, and this: “Russian aluminum giant Rusal spent most of last year under US sanctions. Now it’s pumping $200 million into a new project in Kentucky.” Home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. What a shock, huh? By the way, Rusal is co-owned by Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard (Len) Blavatnik, who donated $2.5 million to McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund through two of his holding companies during the 2016 campaign and a further $1 million in 2017.

Meanwhile, McConnell launched his re-election campaign Thursday morning, conveniently just as Attorney General William Barr was frantically trying to spin the upcoming disaster of the Mueller report release away. The cornerstone of his announcement was that he’s introducing legislation to raise the age for buying tobacco products to 21. As of now, Kentucky reporter Joe Sonka has tweeted that McConnell hasn’t been asked about the report and the new big investment from Russia in his state.

earth 2!!!

Majority of Republicans think evangelical Christians are more discriminated against than minorities

​A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters believe evangelical Christians face more discrimination in society than women, Muslims, and black, Latinx, and LGBTQ people, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, published Monday.

According to the survey, there is a broad consensus that certain groups in America face persistent discrimination. Approximately 82% of the 1,503 respondents said Muslims face at least some form of discrimination. That number was around 80% for black Americans; 76% said Latinx people suffered some form of discrimination in society, and 75% said LGBTQ people faced at least some form of discrimination as well.

Broken down by party affiliation, however, responses were vastly different. Only 34% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters believed Muslims experience “a lot” of discrimination in society, compared with 75% of Democrat or Democratic-leaning voters. Sixty-nine percent of Republican or Republican-leaning voters believed Muslims faced “some discrimination,” compared with 92% among Democrat or Democratic-leaning voters.

Only 19% of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents said they believe black Americans faced “a lot” of discrimination. Sixty-six percent said black Americans faced “some” discrimination. Approximately 22% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters said “gays and lesbians” faced “a lot” of discrimination, while 60% said they faced “some” form of discrimination.

Ten percent and 52% said women faced “a lot” or “some” discrimination, respectively, and 16% and 59% said the same of Latinx people.

By contrast, among Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents, 69% and 92% said they believe black Americans faced “a lot” or “some” discrimination, respectively. Fifty-seven percent said “gays and lesbians” faced “a lot” of discrimination, while 87% said they faced at least “some.” Approximately 44% and 84% said they believe women faced “a lot” or “some” discrimination. Among Democrats, 58% also said Latinx people faced “a lot” of discrimination while 89% said the group faced at least “some” discrimination.

Asked about evangelical Christians, Republicans and Republican-leaning voters said the group faced the most discrimination of any in the United States, with 70% saying they faced at least “some” discrimination and 30% saying they faced “a lot.”

Among Democrats, only 32% said evangelical Christians faced “some” discrimination. Just 8% said evangelicals experienced “a lot” of discrimination. (The poll did not break down evangelicals by race.)

​Republican fears over evangelical discrimination appear at odds with the statistical rise in hate crimes, which increased for the third year running from 2016 to 2017, under the Trump administration. The vast majority of this violence — as exemplified by the Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, the recent spate of arson attacks targeting historically black churches in Louisiana, and a foiled 2016 plot by Kansas militiamen to attack a housing complex where Somali Muslims lived — has targeted minority groups.

Compounding problems, the FBI’s collating of hate crimes has been repeatedly criticized as woefully incomplete.

Reporting hate crimes to the Bureau is currently voluntary, meaning that many police departments don’t bother to submit reports or, when they do, vastly under-report the number of incidents occurring in their jurisdictions. As The New York Times noted last November, for instance, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department initially reported zero hate crimes for all of 2017, before later claiming the report had been made in error and adjusting the figure to 61.

The perception of who faces discrimination in the United States has remained relatively unchanged since 2016, when Pew last conducted the survey. One noticeable change was a 20-point jump in the number of participants who said that Jews faced discrimination, rising from 44% in 2016 to 64% in 2019.

Two Charts - One Seeming Outcome

TheBlackAdder - demo underground​4/16/19

Paul Krugman: Republicans don’t give a damn about the country or its Constitution

“This structure…rewards, indeed insists on, absolute fealty. What this means is that nearly all Republicans in today’s Congress are apparatchiks, political creatures with no higher principle beyond party loyalty.

"In a perverse way, we should count ourselves lucky that Trump is as terrible as he is,” he observes, ominously. “The point is that given the character of the Republican Party, we’d be well on the way to autocracy if the man in the White House had even slightly more self-control. Trump may have done himself in; but it can still happen here.”

*GOP AND ANTISEMITISM

In today's Washington Post...

Grins - demo underground​4/9/19

In today's Washington Post there is this statement from a Republican Congressman about Rep. Ilhan Omar calling Stephen Miller a white nationalist:

“During my time in Congress ...I didn’t once witness another Member target Jewish people like this with the name calling & other personal attacks.” - Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), ​Yes, no one from your party ever took on any Jew like, say....George Soros.

Like Richard Nixon Or Fred Malek. Or Jim "Eff the Jews" Baker. Or J.D. Haworth. Or Pat Buchanan who argued there are too many Jews on the Supreme Court! Or GOP Rep. Walsh who argued ‘American Jews Aren’t As Pro-Israel As They Should Be’ Or Republican congressional candidate Carl DeMaio who posted a photo of a condom package that said “Israel, it’s still safe to come,” and wrote “Fucking’ Jews” to accompany that picture. Or Reich-wing hate radio host, Jan Mickelson, who went after Justices Kagan and Ginsburg: "They are both liberal Jews." Or Michele Bachmann who wrapped up a tour of Israel with a renewed drive to convert as many Jews as possible to Christianity. Or the focus group with Donald Trump supporters who said they would vote for Trump - even if he proposed a “national registry of Jews.” Or the Trump supporter in Arizona who said “If she is Jewish, she should go back to her country." Or the Trump administration's Bible study leader, Evangelical "pastor", Ralph Drollinger who said God doesn't hear prayers of Jews. Or when Dinesh D'Souza retweeted a tweet with the hashtag "Burn the Jews." Or America's favorite narcoleptic neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson, who said "Jews are great but not always as appreciative as our Christian friends". Or when Trump tweeted a pic of Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of dollar bills, next to a six-point star. Or when Trump promoted Nazi Twitter account,"WhiteGenocideTM", that showed him gassing Bernie Sanders. Or when Trump said to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” and that “you want to control your own politician.” Or when Trump said to the Republican Jewish Coalition, "Is there anyone in this room who doesn't renegotiate deals...This room negotiates them - perhaps more than any other room I've ever spoken in". Or when Trump said, "The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."Or when Trump told a Jewish reporter to "sit down" and heatedly denied he was anti-Semitic Or when Steve Bannon who objected to sending his daughters to a certain school because it had too many Jewish children. Or when Bannon sponsored an ad claiming Hillary Clinton was "part of a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class," while images flashed on the screen of George Soros, Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein - all of them Jewish. Or that Trump omitted omitting any mention of Jews in his Holocaust Memorial Day statement. Or Bannon's deputy, Sebastian Gorka, who once joined members of the anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary. Or the fascist gathering in Washington, DC that celebrated Trump's election where attendees shouted "Hail Trump!" and gave the Nazi salute. Or when the Trump campaign's Michael Flynn criticized “the corrupt Democratic machine” and vowed “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” Or when an Alaska GOP group ran an ad depicting Jewish candidate Jesse Kiehl, seen stuffing a wad of hundred-dollar bills into his suit. Or when North Carolina’s state Republican Party depicted Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) doing the same thing. Or when Republicans in Washington state showed Jewish Democratic congressional candidate Kim Schrier of doing the same thing. Or GOP candidate Tyler Diep, showed his Jewish challenger Josh Lowenthal tinted in green, with $100 bills in his hands. Or Connecticut Republican Ed Charamut’s campaign that showed his Jewish challenger holding a stack of cash in front of him, with a crazed look in his eyes. Or the Trump supporter who clubbed woman and vandalized Jewish center in Colorado. Or when New York Times' Jonathan Weisman called out anti-Semitism among Trump supporters and was flooded with anti-Semitism comments. Or the Trump supporting neo-Nazi and white supremacist website, The Daily Stormer, dedicated to solving "the Jewish problem". Or Mayor Dan Clevenger who "Kind Of Agreed" with the white supremacist who killed three people at Jewish facilities. Or Jerome Corsi and Sandy Rios who said "Powerful Jewish Forces" will destroy Ameica. Or when Texas Republican Speaker of the House had to battle anti-Semitism to get RE-ELECTED, and replaced with a "good" Christian. Or Trump's "America First" foreign policy slogan, adopting the name of the pro-Nazi American anti-Semitic isolationists.

L​istening to Republicans, it’s apparent they don’t have much respect for the intelligence of the American people.

Over 70 percent of Americans want a national health care system like every other developed country in the world has, but the GOP tells us that we just aren’t smart enough to make it work. It’ll be too confusing and complex for average Americans, they say, and, besides that, if the government “takes over” our health care system, we’re on our way to tyranny.

​About two-thirds of Americans think that we should have free college education for anybody intellectually capable of attending, and free trade schools as well—like pretty much every other developed country in the world (and quite a few of the developing countries). Republicans tell us that we can’t use government funds to pay off our nation’s $1.5 trillion in student debt because we just borrowed that exact amount last year to give tax rebates to billionaires, so there’s nothing left. We’re just not smart enough to fix the problem.

And we could never, they tell us, go back to the free college like Thomas Jefferson created (he founded the University of Virginia as a free college), Abraham Lincoln instituted (he pushed for and got legislation to create 54 “land grant” colleges like Michigan State University with enough formerly public land that they could provide free or very cheap tuition), and Ronald Reagan ended in California when he was governor. Grandpa might have been able to pay for college with a part-time job in a gas station or restaurant (as I and most in my generation did), and no other country in the world may have the kind of student debt we have, but it’s just the way it is, they tell us. American’s just can’t figure it out.

Nearly eight out of ten Americans think taxes should be raised on the wealthy, but, the Republicans tell us, that would create economic chaos and destroy the economy. We’d end up like all those other countries where there’s a strong and vibrant middle class, but the billionaires can’t hoard their wealth without limit, and that would be a disaster… because… freedom. Americans who think rich people should pay their fair share of taxes to help the country are just, well, not that bright, says the GOP.

Just under two-thirds of Americans think our minimum wage should be $15 and look at Denmark, where MacDonald’s pays $20 an hour and a Big Mac costs only 80 cents more than in the United States (and Danish workers can easily afford that!). “Can’t we do that or even three-quarters of that?” they ask. “No,” Republicans say, “it’ll be too much of a burden on the poor executives and stockholders who might have to take slightly lower pay and dividends. It’s not possible.” We’re just not clever enough to figure out how to do such things, they tell us.

​The Green New Deal is supported by 81 percent of registered voters, but, Republicans tell us, Americans just aren’t as smart as Norwegians (who have 60 percent of all car sales electric now and will totally phase out gas and diesel cars in eight years) or Germans (who produced more than 100 percent of the electricity their country needed a few days last year from renewable sources). We have to keep digging coal and drilling for oil and gas, polluting the planet, causing tens of thousands of cancers, and destroying the biosphere, because, after all, we wouldn’t want to cut the revenue to a vital industry, would we? Republicans even think that Americans will believe them when they say that the Green New Deal will mean we all have to stop eating hamburgers and flying, and must turn our cars over to “jackbooted thugs from the big government.”

A solid majority of Americans think women should make their own decisions on birth control and abortion, and that America should do more to provide prenatal care, and nine out of ten Americans think we should offer government-funded free pre-K daycare. But Republicans point to the states they run, like Mississippi where a woman is more likely to die in childbirth than in Bosnia or Botswana, and tell us that this is just how things have to be. Only by outlawing all abortion, Mississippi Republican Governor Phil Bryant tells us, can Mississippi become “the safest place in America for an unborn child.” Nothing else will work; we’ve lost that “take a man to the moon and bring him home safely” intellect we used to have.

Whether it’s strengthening environmental regulations, breaking up monopolies, restraining CEO pay, fully funding our public schools, or getting money out of politics—all things that have been done by most if not all of the fully developed countries in the world—Republicans tell us we just can’t do those things here in America. We’re just not that intelligent.

The story goes that Lincoln, during his debates with Stephen Douglas, said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Clearly the modern Republican Party, its billionaire funders and its media oligarchs have decided to stick with Lincoln’s logic. As long as they can fool some of the people all of the time, they don’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of us; that’s enough to win elections, particularly if they can continue to strategically suppress millions of votes.

They have their plan, and they’re sticking to it. They’re really, really smart.

And, in the process, Republicans have turned the USA into the world’s village idiot.

More Things You Have To Believe To Be A Republican Today: Smocking Gun Edition

​Fritz67 - demo underground​12/18/18

Things You Have To Believe To Be A Republican During the Holiday Season Today:

* You spend the entire campaign blasting Hillary Clinton for using a private email server while conducting government business. The daughter Donald Trump has a creepy sexual interest in uses a private email to conduct government business and you don't see anything wrong with it. (#28, April 2017)

“Poverty is a death sentence,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a 2016 campaign rally. The audience nodded. They should’ve screamed. Look at the history. Look at the statistics. Conservative and neoliberal policies kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. When Republicans dismantle Obamacare, they kill people. When lawmakers from both parties shred the safety net, they kill people.

Republicans, however, have gone even further, consistently shaping the GOP into the party of negligent homicide. They intentionally increase the structural violence of the state. The victims die but we don’t “see” them because our media focuses on the personal, not systemic. We’re trained to see authorities as legitimate, so it’s nearly impossible to recognize them as mass murderers. But the poor are dying in an ongoing crisis that needs a radical, humanitarian politics.

​The US Is a Crime Scene

What is negligent homicide? It’s when you expose someone to risks that a reasonable person would say are unjustifiable. Death wasn’t the intention but the result. Like when a self-help guru accidently broiled visitors in his sweat lodge. Or the school driver with a bus full of kids sped over railroad tracks to outrace a train and got rammed.

Many cases involve a vehicle. The biggest case involves the largest vehicle in history: the nation state. In Plato’s oft-cited metaphor from The Republic, the ship of state can be dangerous when steered by the greedy.

When conservatives steer the state, “we the people” are in danger. We lose welfare, lose public land, lose health care, lose access to voting and lose legal protections. The humanitarian side of the state that provides for people is dismantled.

Hierarchy is exploited for the wealthy as police and military are reinforced. Tax crusader Grover Norquist said the goal is to cut government so small, Republicans can “drown it in the bathtub.”

When they kill the state, they kill the many people who need it to live. Right now, someone who never had health care is dying in an emergency room. Right now, a child is screaming from hunger. Right now, a Black woman who has been stressed by racism for years clutches her chest during a heart attack.

In our nation of 325 million, the 40 million poor and 30 million without health care need the safety net to save them or save their lifespans from being cut by stress or sickness. Academic reports say it. Medical journals say it. Protesters say it. So, when our lawmakers dismantle the state, they commit negligent homicide. Any reasonable person can see the math and know the “free market” is an unjustified risk to the poor.

Health Scare

“We are making America great again,” President Trump said as Republicans smiled, big toothy smiles. He signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, selling it as the freeing of business from federal red tape and taxes. In reality, Republicans had signed the death warrant for thousands of people.

With a stroke of his pen, Trump ended Obamacare’s individual mandate, which forced people to either buy health insurance or pay a fine. Without it, 13 million people would leave Obamacare and some will die. Weeks earlier, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said on CNBC, “When people lose health care, they’re less likely to get preventive care, they’re more likely to defer health care they need and are more likely to die.” Ten thousand people. That’s how many he said would die. Ten Thousand.​And many were already dying. In 2009, a report found that 45,000 lives were lost annually from lack of health care, or one every 12 minutes. In 2010, 49.9 million Americans were uninsured; after Obamacare, it was down to 28 million in 2016. And with that 44 percent decrease, the annual death rate, based on the report, would be roughly, 26,000 people. How is it that they are invisible? How are these preventable deaths not seen as a crime?

In 2009, MoveOn.org made a video in which people held signs: One woman’s sign said her mom is nearly medically bankrupt; a nurse’s sign said her aunt has cancer. Face after face followed. A woman using a wheelchair, a man with a heart surgery scar and another man breathing by tubes — all held signs saying “we can’t wait” for health insurance.

Nine years later, I wonder if they got help. Did they live? Are they at risk of losing insurance as the Republicans attack Obamacare? In a few years, if MoveOn.org reshot that video with those people, how many of their faces would be replaced by gravestones?

The Killing Fields of Poverty

​“One thing we’re going to be looking at very strongly is welfare reform,” Trump said at an October 2017 White House meeting. “People are taking advantage of the system and other people aren’t receiving what they need.” He shook his head in a tut-tut, “bad poor people” type of way as the cameras snapped.

On April 10,2018, he issued an executive order for federal agencies to look at work requirements and block grants to states. It’s an easy target. Republicans are too scared to go after Social Security and Medicare before midterms, so they go after the poor, whom US lawmakers have demonized for decades as “social parasites.”

Last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston traveled from Skid Row to the Deep South to hurricane-battered Puerto Rico. He found a dying US. He documents how the 40 million poor scrape leftover food and compassion to survive day to day. Five million are in desperate conditions.He saw women bitten raw from bed bugs in their tents. He saw a man whose teeth were rotted, yellow stubs. He smelled sewage spewing from a kitchen sink. He visited homes in Puerto Rico, smashed to splinters and rubble by the storm.Six years before Alston’s travels, US scientists calculated the number of Americans who annually die from poverty in a 2011 report; it’s 291,000. Divided by the number of days in a year, that comes to 797 people a day. They die invisibly because we choose not to see them. They die away from the cameras. They die alone and scared. Officially, the fatal condition is diabetes, heart attack or high blood pressure, but really, it’s the weathering of the body by stress, grief and hopelessness.

Republicans have signaled to voters that if they’re still in power after the midterms, they plan to use the giant federal deficit caused by their tax bill to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps. If they do, the poor will die in the segregated zip codes that Alston visited. They are dying there right now.

The Humanitarian State

“It’s awesome, man,” said Scott Miller, a volunteer dentist for Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit group that sets up mobile medical clinics to give free dental and vision care alongside disaster relief. He just worked on a man’s teeth for four hours. Someone flashed a mirror in front of the patient, who smiled and said he couldn’t recognize himself.

“It’s the only thing I can do,” Miller told ABC News as his voice shook. “I can change somebody’s life just like that.” His sincere joy at repairing lives is a glimpse of what American humanitarian politics could be.

Imagine a politics that acknowledged the ongoing crisis of the poor and planned an immediate intervention. Imagine an administration that took billions from the Pentagon and Homeland Security to scale up nonprofits like Remote Area Medical so it could rent stadiums in the cities and towns for people to come from afar to get free dental care, mammogram tests, basic physicals and glasses.

Imagine a White House that nationalized vacant buildings and renovated them for those without homes. And made sure everyone had a Medicare for All card in their wallet. Imagine if everyone had a college to go to for free and a future they could see.

Americans could touch their new teeth and new glasses, knowing for the first time in generations that negligent homicide actually is a crime. And a lot of people were its victims, including conservative voters.

It sounds like a dream, but it happens everywhere all the time. In civil society, countless groups practice a humanitarian politics. Any “reasonable person” knows that when you heal poverty, a new world may not be the intention, but it is the result.

Allies Of Vladimir Putin Funneled Money To Senior Republicans

by Erica - the intellectualist6/9/18

​Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham are among those who benefited from Russia-linked donations.

A close look at public campaign finance reports reveals a network of Russian oligarchs increasingly contributing to top Republican leadership in recent years, according to Dallas News.

And thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United in 2010, the donations are perfectly legal.

An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.

The Russian billionaire is one of the U.K.'s wealthiest, with an estimated net worth of $20 billion. Prior to the 2016 election season, Blavatnik's political donations were bipartisan and meager.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

It is unclear why Republicans would knowingly accept donations from such contributors, particularly after Russia's attempt to interfere with the presidential election was known:

Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings.

The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.

gop funnies

Passing those tax cuts was as easy as taking healthcare from a baby! - New Yorker

Remember, wait until after Christmas to steal their Social Security and Medicare - New Yorker

GOP - Party of Traitors

*DONT YOU FEEL LIKE DAMN FOOLS, GOP?

​NanceGreggs

From Demo Underground: ​Because really, you should.

Donald Trump is a proven liar, an adulterer, a self-declared pussy-grabber who has openly boasted of sexually assaulting women. THIS is the man the “Christians” among you have continued to defend, and their leaders have declared to be “chosen by God”.

Donald Trump is a barely-literate, ill-informed idiot who has demonstrated, time and again, that he has no knowledge of the country’s workings, nor the workings of our relationships with our allies. THIS is the man you elected to lead the most powerful nation on earth, the man you insisted was a “brilliant businessman” who would dazzle us all with his intelligence.

Donald Trump is a lazy, do-nothing “pResident” who spends the majority of his time tweeting nonsense, watching TV, and golfing. THIS is the man you encouraged your party members to vote for because he would work tirelessly on their behalf.

Donald Trump cheated hard-working Americans out of their pay when they worked for him, had to settle a court case against him for cheating people out of their money with his phoney “university”, and still has every single product bearing his “brand” manufactured in low-wage countries. THIS is the man you told your constituents would put America first, and would bring jobs back to the US.

Donald Trump has persisted in distancing our nation from its allies, while openly praising our country’s enemies. He continues to pour gasoline on the volatile situations presented by North Korea and the Middle East. THIS is the man you held out as being able to save the nation from Obama’s “mismanagement” of our relationships with the global community.

Donald Trump has appointed inexperienced, incompetent cronies to positions of power and influence. THIS is the man you insisted would surround himself with “the best people” – many of whom are now under investigation and/or have had to resign in disgrace.

Donald Trump has accomplished nothing that betters the lives of Americans. He has not kept a single campaign promise – in fact, he has achieved absolutely nothing other than accusing his political rivals of doing what he himself has done, and calling for endless investigations into anyone who dares point out that your naked emperor has no clothes.

THIS is the man you have lied for, cheated for, even perjured yourselves for. THIS is the man you have abandoned your “Christian” principles for, who you have coddled and defended, who you have made endless excuses for, and whose abject idiocy, ignorance and blatant lies you have defended for over a year.

Ultimately, THIS is the man – the one under investigation for colluding with our enemies as evidence of his guilt mounts every day, whose lies are now the stuff of legend, whose mental competence is clearly questionable, whose buffoonery on the world stage has made our country the laughingstock of the world – that you have chosen to protect-and-defend, while failing to protect-and-defend the rights of your own fellow citizens, the freedoms the Constitution assures them, and the environment in which they live.

In light of all of the above – and much, much more – the obvious questions would be: “Are you not embarrassed by THIS MAN’s displays of incompetence, ignorance, and lies? Are you not totally humiliated by his displays of outright stupidity? Are you not concerned that an obviously mentally-unhinged madman has the nuclear codes at his disposal?”

But sadly, those questions have now been answered. While you busy yourselves trying to cover-up THIS MAN’s apparent incompetence, lies and deceit, your only real focus is trying to take affordable healthcare away from millions of Americans while giving tax breaks to the wealthy. While our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico are dying for lack of food, potable water and electricity, you busy yourselves with undoing the regulations that protect the food, water, and the infrastructure that all Americans depend upon.

The silver lining in all of this is the fact that THIS MAN – the one who you have risked your party’s reputation on – is going down. The evidence against him, his cronies, and his family members is already overwhelming – and it builds by the day. And make no mistake – your party is going down with him. Trump’s collusion with the Russians in order to subvert our democratic elections is becoming crystal clear – and by covering for him, your own complicity is being exposed for what it is.

But by all means, keep on keeping’ on. Keep pretending that your Idiot-in-Chief – the one who handed over classified information to the Russians in the Oval Office – is above reproach. Keep insisting – despite last Tuesday’s election results – that the jerk-off you stand behind is beloved by a nation. Keep telling yourselves that when the shit hits the fan, you will somehow be immune from the storm of feces that is about to be splattered all over your party.

Say what you will about the Democrats – anything you want. Go to it – do your worst. We can handle it – and that’s because it’s YOUR MAN who is drowning in the worst scandal the country has ever seen. We’re just the people standing on the shore, laughing our asses off and thanking whatever deities we believe in, while you sink beneath the waves of your own dishonesty, stupidity, and oh-so-obvious hypocrisy.

no limit on greed!!!

​Paradise Papers: The seven Republican super-donors who keep money in tax havensParadise Papers show these men, who invest heavily in Super Pacs, share a presence offshore if not a love of Trump

From The Guardian: ​Seven Republican super-donors helped bankroll the conservative push for power in the 2016 election cycle, between them pumping more than $350m (£264m) into federal and state races.

The Paradise Papers illuminate another aspect of these vastly wealthy men – their propensity to nurture offshore some of their combined fortunes, estimated by Forbes at $142bn, largely beyond the reach of public scrutiny and tax authorities.

The seven have their divisions, especially over Donald Trump. Warren Stephens was a major backer of the Stop Trump movement last year, while Geoff Palmer was among the then Republican nominee’s biggest financial backers.

But they share a presence in tax havens. In turn, they face a legitimate question as they wield influence by investing in Super Pacs with names including “Rebuilding America now”, “Right to rise USA” and “American unity”: are their political principles undermined by their offshore practices?

Warren Stephens

Stephens, a major Republican donor, was the hiddenco-owner of a payday lending company US authorities are suing for$50m after it allegedly used predatory tactics to deceive customers about the true cost of their loans.

He is identified in the leaked documents as one of the two main owners of a group of short-term lenders including Integrity Advance, which is accused of violating federal laws.

The Paradise Papers reveal that the billionaire financier, based in Arkansas, holds a 40% stake in the lender’s parent company, which donated widely to US political campaigns over recent years while its link to Stephens was generally unknown....

Charles and David Koch

...Charles and David Koch control Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the US. In 2005, they bought the paper and pulp giant Georgia-Pacific for $21bn.

The Kochs took their new holding private, and in doing so shut the door on public access to information about its internal workings. The Paradise Papers open that door, giving a glimpse of how Georgia-Pacific conducts its affairs offshore.

Within months of the company being acquired by the Kochs, it relocated millions of dollars of profits from high-tax jurisdictions such as the US and UK to low-tax environments in Luxembourg and the offshore haven Bermuda.

At the center of the money shuffle was Georgia-Pacific Britain Ltd, a subsidiary leasing paper production equipment, which was incorporated in Bermuda but controlled and managed out of the UK....

Sheldon Adelson

The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave $100m to Republican candidates in 2012, followed by $77.9m in 2016 and $5m to Trump’s inaugural festivities, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Information that Adelson has already made public shows he runs three jets in Bermuda, including two Boeing 747s customized for luxury travel.

The planes are operated alongside Adelson’s fleet of 16 private jets in Las Vegas for the use of his company’s executives and VIP guests.

One of the Bermuda 747s is registered to Sands Aviation Bermuda Ltd, and the other to Interface Operations Bermuda Ltd, which is controlled by Adelson and his wife, Miriam. Interface also owns an Airbus A340.

Geoff Palmer

The billionaire Los Angeles real estate magnate, who has given millions of dollars to Trump and other Republican election campaigns, has an offshore company and a private jet in Bermuda.

Palmer, who once told a reporter “I don’t like paying taxes” and has described affordable housing quotas as “immoral”, last year donated $5m to a Super Pac that supported Trump’s presidential campaign and $310,000 to Trump’s “victory fund”. In 2012, he gave $500,000 to Romney’s failed Republican presidential campaign....

Steve Wynn

Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas and Macau casino mogul, became finance chair of the Republican National Committee in January.

In 2004, Wynn’s empire set up, with the help of the law firm Appleby, an intricate loan agreement that tied together a web of corporations across several tax havens to finance a new casino resort in Macau.

AdvertisementThe mesh of concerns, details of which were made public to the SEC, linked Wynn’s interests in Las Vegas, Hong Kong and the Isle of Man.

The Appleby files record the Republican donor’s offshore presence in the Isle of Man, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, and in some cases give frank accounts of the potential tax advantages.

In one of the Paradise Papers, lawyers tell Wynn his businesses are “exempt from taxation in the Isle of Man in terms of the income tax”, a point Wynn Macau Ltd later noted in public filings to the SEC when it declared: “The group is exempted from income tax in the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands.”...

Paul Singer

​The Paradise Papers show the lengths to which the major Republican donor, hedge fund manager and “vulture capitalist” will go to extract debt from one of the world’s poorer countries.

The leaked documents contain a paper trail relating to one of Singer’s subsidiaries as it pursued entities in Congo-Brazzaville to try to retrieve debt it had bought at a knockdown price.

The practice of distressed-debt acquisitions is a Singer speciality. The leaked documents add new texture to the pursuit of the Republic of the Congo by the hedge fund manager, who gave $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Kensington International Ltd, a Cayman-Islands-based subsidiary of Singer’s Elliott Management, had bought $57m of debts owed by the Congo-Brazzaville government after it borrowed money in the 1980s.

The debt was to be repaid at 8% interest – a good deal as long as the company could eventually retrieve the money. When it failed to do so, Kensington secured a ruling from a court in London in 2003 that increased the amount Congo-Brazzaville owed it to about $100m...

party of traitors!!!!

GOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to Russia

Ruth May, Contributor

From Dallas News: Party loyalty is often cited as the reason that GOP leaders have not been more outspoken in their criticism of President Donald Trump and his refusal to condemn Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Yet there may be another reason that top Republicans have not been more vocal in their condemnation. Perhaps it's because they have their own links to the Russian oligarchy that they would prefer go unnoticed.

Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.

During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.

Marco Rubio's Conservative Solutions PAC and his Florida First Project received $1.5 million through Blavatnik's two holding companies. Other high dollar recipients of funding from Blavatnik were PACS representing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at $1.1 million, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at $800,000, Ohio Governor John Kasich at $250,000 and Arizona Senator John McCain at $200,000.

In January, Quartz reported that Blavatnik donated another $1 million to Trump's Inaugural Committee. Ironically, the shared address of Blavatnik's companies is directly across the street from Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in New York.Len Blavatnik, considered to be one of the richest men in Great Britain, holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K. He is known for his business savvy and generous philanthropy, but not without controversy.

In 2010, Oxford University drew intense criticism for accepting a donation of 75 million pounds from Blavatnik for a new school of government bearing his name. Faculty, alumni and international human rights activists claimed the university was selling its reputation and prestige to Putin's associates.

Blavatnik's relationships with Russian oligarchs close to Putin, particularly Oleg Deripaska, should be worrisome for Trump and the six GOP leaders who took Blavatnik's money during the 2016 presidential campaign. Lucky for them no one has noticed. Yet.

Oleg Deripaska is the founder and majority owner of RUSAL, the world's second largest aluminum company, based in Russia. Len Blavatnik owns a significant stake in RUSAL and served on its Board until November 10, 2016, two days after Donald Trump was elected.

Deripaska controls RUSAL with a 48 percent majority stake through his holding company, EN+ Group, and the Russian government owns 4.35 percent stake of EN+ Group through its second-largest state owned bank, VTB. VTB was exposed in the Panama papers in 2016for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Vladimir Putin and is under sanctions by the U.S. government.

Deripaska has been closely connected to the Kremlin since he married into Boris Yeltsin's family in 2001, which literally includes him in the Russian clan known as "The Family."According to the Associated Press, starting in 2006, Deripaska made annual payments of $10 million to Paul Manafort through the Bank of Cyprus to advance Putin's global agenda.

Len Blavatnik's co-owner in RUSAL is his long-time business partner, Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin. Blavatnik and Vekselberg hold their 15.8 percent joint stake in RUSAL in the name of Sual Partners, their offshore company in the Bahamas. Vekselberg also happens to be the largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus.

Another oligarch with close ties to Putin, Dmitry Rybolovlev, owns a 3.3 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus.

Rybolovlev is known as "Russia's Fertilizer King" and has been in the spotlight for several months as the purchaser of Trump's 60,000 square-foot mansion in Palm Beach. Rybolovlev bought the estate for $54 million more than Trump paid for the property at the bottom of the crash in the U.S. real estate market.

The convoluted web that links Putin's oligarchs to Trump's political associates and top Republicans is difficult to take in.

Trump and Putin have a common approach to governance. They rely heavily on long-term relationships and family ties. While there have been tensions between Putin and Deripaska over the years, the Kremlin came to Deripaska's rescue in 2009 when he was on the verge of bankruptcy by providing a $4.5 billion emergency loan through state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB), where Putin is chair of the advisory board.

VEB, known as President Putin's "pet bank," is now in crisis after sanctions applied by Europe and U.S. in 2014 have isolated it from the international banks that were the sources of its nearly $4 billion in hard currency loans that, according to Bloomberg, mature this year and in 2018.

Russia's international currency reserves are near a 10-year low, which has put further pressure on the president of VEB, Sergey Gorkov, to find sources of international rescue capital. Notably, it was Gorkov who met secretly with Jared Kushner in December at Trump Tower. Kushner's failure to report the meeting with Gorkov has drawn the attention of the Senate intelligence committee that now wants to question Kushner about the meeting.